Exploring Thermal Interaction for Visual Art Color Appreciation for the Visually Impaired People

Visually impaired people can take much advantage of multimodal systems in which visual information is communicated by several modes whose combined strengths make up for the lack of vision. Among possible interaction modes, thermal interaction applied to assistive devices for the blind is a field which lacks research in spite of its potential. In this paper, a novel temperature-color cross-modal algorithm is designed and applied to the context of tactile artwork exploration by the visually impaired people. Initial interviews and tests were performed after developing a relief model of an artwork and a heating device. The goal is to assess the potential for the cross-modal algorithm and of thermal interaction for blind people in tactile art appreciation.