Tag: feeling fireworks

  • Disney Developing Fireworks You Can Feel For The Visually Impaired

    Disney Developing Fireworks You Can Feel For The Visually Impaired

    With the new year right around the corner fireworks certainly come to mind and we all know that no one does fireworks like Disney Parks and Resorts. In an effort to make their fireworks spectacular inclusive for everyone, Disney recently announced they are working on a way for visually impaired guests to ‘Feel’ fireworks.

    Known as Feeling Fireworks, Disney Research has been hard at work developing a prototype of a unique haptics-supported fireworks display experience specially tailored to visually impaired users.

    Unveiled at the User Interface Software and Technology conference held in Quebec City, Canada back in october, the low-cost technology is still in very early stages, but it has a 66 percent success rate and is making good progress. The team plans to continue improving the experience and believes that the day will come when everyone will be able to enjoy the thrill of fireworks shows.

    Tactile effects are created using directable water jets that spray onto the rear of a flexible screen, with different nozzles for different firework effects. The approach is low-cost and scales well, and allows for dynamic tactile effects to be rendered with high spatial resolution. A user study demonstrated that the tactile effects are meaningful analogs to the visual fireworks that they represent, with sighted users able to label the correct correspondence of tactile-to-visual effects by a large margin over chance. Beyond the specific application, the technology represents a novel and cost-effective approach for making large scalable tactile displays, with the potential for wider use.

    As Disney continues to take more steps to find creative solutions—with the use of new technology—for ensuring the most inclusive experience possible for all the visitors to its parks, we look forward to hearing about even bigger and more innovative designs in the future.