18 Facts About Optacon

Optacon is an electromechanical device that enables blind people to read printed material that has not been transcribed into Braille.

The Optacon was conceived by John Linvill, a professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, and developed with researchers at Stanford Research Institute.

The Optacon offers capabilities that no other device offers including the ability to see a printed page or computer screen as it truly appears including drawings, typefaces, and specialized text layouts.

The Optacon includes a knob to adjust the intensity at which the tactile array rods vibrate, a knob to set the image threshold between white and black needed to turn on the vibration of the rods in the tactile array, and a switch that determines whether images will be interpreted as dark print on a light background or as light print on a dark background.

Optacon was developed by John Linvill, a professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, who later became head of the Electrical Engineering Department.

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The Optacon was developed with researchers at Stanford Research Institute.

Optacon has worked as a clinical psychologist since, so, like her father, she is often referred to in the press as "Dr Linvill".

The only one of these that was competitive to the Optacon development was the Stereotoner, basically an improved optophone.

The Optacon project assisted Stanford in establishing their Integrated Circuits facilities, leading MIT's Dean of Engineering to remark that Stanford got the lead in integrated circuit research because of the Optacon.

Therefore, the Optacon was designed with 24 vertical pixels instead of 12.

The Optacon design was therefore based on an array of 24-by-6 pixels in both the camera retina and bimorph array.

In July 1972, Harry Garland suggested a new design for the Optacon that incorporated the sensor, tactile array, and electronics in a single hand-held unit.

The earliest complete Optacon-like reading aids were built at Stanford and SRI with a lens system that focused the images from the printed page on a fiber optic bundle with individual fibers connected to discrete phototransistors.

The first Optacon incorporating these advances, Model S-15, was a significant milestone.

The engineers were anxious to know how well the Optacon components held up in a real life environment, what uses were made of the Optacon, how much was it used, and how important was it in educational, vocational, and daily living.

Optacon was manufactured and marketed from 1971 to 1996 by Telesensory Systems Inc of Silicon Valley, California.

Some work was done by other companies to develop an updated version of the Optacon to reduce the cost of the device and take advantage of newer technology, but no device with the versatility of the Optacon had been developed as of 2007.

The Optacon offers capabilities that no other device offers including the ability to see a printed page or computer screen as it truly appears including drawings, typefaces, and specialized text layouts.