If you’re blind, you don’t have a ton of options…for anything really. Not many companies are making special gear for you. The gear you do have doesn’t get upgraded as much as regular people’s. For instance, how many watches do you see that cater to the blind? I’m sure they are out there, but there can’t be many.

Check out this braille watch conceived by David Chavez. The Haptica Braille watch will give the blind the time, so they don’t have to have someone else tell them what time it is. For the moment, it’s just a concept and the Braille dots are on tiny disks that rotate. Only half of the disk is showing. As the time goes by and the disks rotate, the dot pattern changes. Pretty simple way to design a braille watch.

You might think this is the next step in the evolution of the Nintendo Wiimote, but it’s really a “smart” wand designed to replace that long stick that the visually impaired have been stuck with for decades. It was created by Jin Woo Han and uses a sensor on the front to detect nearby objects by providing feedback about how far away those objects are, through varying levels of vibration.

The wand even includes a tactile strip in the area where you place your thumb that will go so far as to indicate the position of objects around you. Both feedback methods beat the hell out of using audio cues, which can be unreliable if there is too much background noise. The Tactile Wand is just a concept at the moment, and we probably will not see it for a long time, but when we do see it, it will be a powerful tool for the sight impaired. I just hope it can also detect the lack of objects, like open man-holes and the like.

Zen is all about being calm with your surroundings, grasshopper. When you look at your PC, do you feel stressed? Of course you do, work, work, work. They call this the sandbox PC, and it should help to alleviate such things and put you in a calm state of mind. Users can use it without even looking at it, because it operates using an active surface which changes texture depending on the area or function you choose.

This would be particularly good for the blind or visually impaired. We are used to visual inputs, they are not. It’s quite a learning curve for those of us with sight, but I don’t think we will be seeing it anytime soon anyway. I hope I’m wrong however, because this would be great for a great tool for those who can not see.