Highly detailed tactile version of the Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci.
To more than 20 million visually impaired children and adults "the Last Supper", "Starry Night" and "The Scream of Nature" all look the same: black. p>
Today, visually-impaireds are cut out from knowing the iconographic face of the Christ, the mysterious smile of the Mona Lisa, or the meaning of Magritte’s "Treachery of images".
This project gives access to visual art, and the culture it expresses, to visually impaireds and blinds (and children, older adults, and anyone else) by adapting famous paintings into a tactile medium.
Super-high quality tactile painting
Stories and details description accompaign the user during the exploration of the artworks.
After testing several solutions, the best quality Braille embosser and pages are used for our publication.
Pages with latin characters.
co-founder
Neuroscience Professor at the Univerisity of California, Los Angeles.
co-founder
Artist and Interactive System Designer
Four new tactile paitings: Caravaggio, Raphael and Correggio.
for the Ministry of the Education, Roma Italy (Nov 19 - Dec 18, 2016)
Palazzo Ducale, Genova (Feb-Apr 2016)
UCLA Office of Information Technology, Open House (Jan 2016)
Rotary, Santa Monica (Dec 2015)
Most of the challenges we needed to overcome were related to: interpretation, details, longevity, and very lower costs to create a great product. For example, to make sure we obtained the highest level of details we wanted to work in a similar production process used in the jewelry industry. This is a complex process that includes: 3D digital artists and designers, sculptors, 3D tooling systems, materials and art experts.
The research process for creating a 3D interpretation of a 2D image was also challenging. We went through several iterations, some of which failed. After several 3D digital artists and designers spent many hours creating 3D models, the models were first reviewed by us together with art historians. At the same time we were selecting the best shop in the world to create the molds we needed.
The booming of the 3D printing and tolling industry has definitely helped our project, but sometimes, all that buzz made it difficult to find the right tools and partners.
Thanks to several past projects we knew all of that already. At the beginning we valuated several shops internationally, then we started working with two and then proceeded only with the one that demonstrated the best capability and expertise.
To proof and improve our project we created several "workshops" (mainly parties) with blinds and visually impaired people with different demography that tested our tactile paintings. User testing allowed us to collect feedback directly from the users. This was something we enjoyed and definitely we’ll keep doing to improve the product.
This is our secret project: Interactive Tactile Painting visually responsive with adaptive audioguide.
Interactive storytelling combining audio guide and hand position.
We envision an itinerant exhibit with the greatest paintings in art history to be discovered by everyone.
Launch soon to be announced! Subscribe to our project to be notified