MessiahAndrw wrote:
I also wondered about a the feasibility of embossing braille on a
shape-memory polymer. Imagine a machine that is long and skinny, like a single line of text. It had a roll of paper wrapped around it on an endless loop, and you can scroll this paper back and forth with your finger. On the right side in a braille embosser, so as you scroll with your finger new characters get embossed into the paper, and as it passes underneath the device electrical current is sent to the memory paper with un-embosses the old braille.
That is an interesting idea, however it would be more practical if the device operated like a traditional braille display and refreshed the entire line when a "scroll" button is pressed, rather than moving the paper with your finger. The latter is not a standard braille reading practice and is likely to take a while to get used to while not being very efficient. Its advantages over a traditional braille display, however, is that you can make a 40-cell or an 80-cell or whatever size display just by varying the amount of "paper" (and changing the softwrae) while only requiring one set of embossing pins (6 pins, or 3 if the designers are especially clever). I'm not sure how the price of shape-memory polymers compares to the current price of piezoelectric braille display components (if we ignore market exploitation, which obviously drives the prices up quite a bit further) but if they are significantly cheaper then it's a case of trading refresh rate for price (i.e. a shape-memory polymer will take longer to refresh as it would have to be wound and embossed all the way through the display, but some people might be willing to give up a bit of refresh rate for a cheaper display).