camera

Samsung have designed a concept camera with a tactile interface, the Touch Sight (from the naming-the bloody-obvious department). It’s a camera with a tactile display at the back, and some sort of sound recording setting to go with your photographs so that you know which is which. The tactile interface, apparently, also acts as a viewfinder, because you can press it to your forehead and it will allow you to compose an image. All wonderful, and the camera won this year’s IDEA gold award. It will probably end up with all other access-for-the-blind niche products: it won’t make it to market, because it is too specialized a product, and so it will remain a somewhat promising, but useless product. No accessible cameras then, for the foreseeable future. It’s a shame, because it would be cool to have a tactile viewfinder. Not to view the image, but to compose and to operate the camera. I can also think of other ways of providing other-sensory viewfinder information, like feedback from the vOICe, which provides a 3D sound image. I would say that is a much more likely application: it already works for most phonecams, so it could be ported to existing production cameras, like Canon’s. This would still leave photographers with interfacing problems regarding handling a camera’s menus and such, but it would improve the main functionality: composing a photograph. It does anger me that even in this Samsung design, on balance, blind photographers were not deemed worthy of a proper camera.