SERVICEPLAN GERMANY

Client: Dot Incorporation
Product: Dot Pad
Title: Dot Pad. The first smart tactile graphics display.
Media: Product, Website, PR, Partnerships
Country: South Korea
Date Of Campaign: 03/01/2022

Background: While most people rely on visuals to understand complex topics, the 285 million blind and visually impaired people worldwide are left out. Tactile books are scarce, expensive, and impractical. Audio descriptions fail to describe complex information.

Idea: Dot Pad. The first smart tactile graphics display for the visually impaired. It can display any visual content from any source. At the core of Dot Pad sits the third generation of the innovative Dot actuator technology. While conventional tactile devices use piezoelectricity to power their actuators, Dot Pad uniquely relies on electromagnetism, which reduces size, weight, power consumption and price by more than ten times. This dramatically increases usability and makes Dot Pad affordable for the majority of blind and visually impaired users. While the Dot actuator technology is protected by 30 patents, it’s licensed to other manufacturers to give as many people as possible the chance to benefit from it.It requires intelligence to understand what’s in an image and decide what’s important to the audience. To create comprehensible tactile content, Dot Pad relies on the innovative Dot Image Processor. It’s an AI that was trained with millions of existing visual and tactile graphics, to be able to analyze, understand and segment visual content, and translate it to tactile graphics on the display of 2,400 dots. There is also an in-built text panel for braille translation. Thanks to a partnership with Apple, Dot Pad integrates seamlessly with iOS and iPadOS, thereby giving users access to the 2.2 million apps on the App Store, out of the box. Dot Pad reduces dependence on tactile textbooks and audio description for graphical content which sighted people are used to freely enjoying.

Results: Launched in early 2022, Dot Pad has earned huge interest from the media as well as public and private institutions worldwide, with millions of dollars in orders. Dot Pad technology is permanently installed in public kiosks in Busan, South Korea.Dot Pad has disrupted the field of accessibility technology with tactile graphics. To create further software and hardware support for tactile graphics, Dot Inc. is in touch with major players in the field to create a unified tactile graphic file format and a dedicated open database of tactile graphics. Dot Inc. is partnering with many educational and governmental institutions like UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, McGill University, and Columbia University (to name a few).