July 24, 2005

• I saw these a couple of times when visiting my exishgirlfriend in Birmingham. Amazing stuff. I want his camera.
• What a lovely planet! Let's care for it, cherish it and be responsible stewards for its bounties and blessings, shared equally with all! Whoops! Too late... Looking forward to him getting his camera over China and Russia too - there seems to be a big old chunk or Eurasia he still has to visit. Also, I call bullshit on the tactile display... there's no way that those blind people could reach the tops of those trees or rock massifs if they were really up in that helicopter.
• I've had a whole bowl of strawberries tonight, so I'm feeling too nice to bop you, Abiezer :P The tactile display is a little of a wildcard, especially for those who have always been blind. They can't really decipher the bumps on the plates, I think, although the plates do look quite lovely too.
• So that's where the famous Alnedra lingering scent of strawberries comes from!
• Lovely post, Alnedra. Thank-you )))
• I was just thinking about how the tactile display would be difficult for someone who's been blind since birth. Without knowledge of perspective I would find the images incredibly obtuse and indecipherable. I wonder if there's a part of the brain which deals exclusively with spatial transforms and depth perception. What if there are people whose said processing centers just don't work right and perceive everything as two-dimensional blobs? Almost equivalent to someone being born with only one functional eye, I would think. Thanks for the post, 'nedra. Have some goreng pisang: )))
• Why do you guys think blind people don't understand dimensions?
• Mr. K., you're misunderstanding. ooga_booga's comment about people who can't perceive dimensions is not about the blind. We were commenting that the blind would have trouble deciphering the tactile displays because, well, how would they decipher them without any reference at all? Having never seen any pictures before, how do they know that these sets of bumps represent a sandy desert, and those sets of bumps are camels?
• nice post, thanks.
• Actually, I *was* talking about depth perception early. How could someone who's been blind since birth know how things look like they're disappearing into the distance if their effective range of perception is an arm's length? Perhaps one could be taught that such phenomena occur, but extracting coherent objects from the pointilism of the tactile displays is made that much harder if those shapes have been distorted by perspective. It's the problem of trying to perceive something for which one doesn't have the experience or equipment to perceive, similar to describing the doppler effect to a person deaf from birth.
• D'oh - "talking about depth perception *earlier*".
• Sorry, ooga_booga. Looks like I was the one who misunderstood.
• Heh, no worries, Alnedra. Perhaps someday there will be help for those def from birth, yo.