Vibraille: We would also like to develop our haptic language, Vibraille. Ultimately, we would like to bring Vibraille to a point where it could be used outside of Opticane's scope for use by the visually impaired and the general public. By varying vibrational intensity, sharpness, and interval, there are numerous ways to communicate through just a few haptic feedback motors.

User Testing: One of the more important aspects of Opticane that we weren't able to touch on due to the pandemic was user testing. User testing would have let us know of any parts of our product that could be improved from a visually impaired person's perspective. These inputs would have been invaluable as none of us working on Opticane suffer from visual impairment and our interviews with the visually impaired under Tech Era were denied due to our interview group being too specific. If we had more time after we could conduct in-person interviews and tests of Opticane, we would definitely benefit from the feedback and insights provided through user testing.

Advanced Haptic Navigation: Using offline maps and satellites, we would like to implement haptic navigation that could essentially act as a GPS that guides you around streets. 

Tutorial Mode: Something that came to our attention while conducting user studies as well as literature reviews was potential users saying they would find it hard to remember what finger would represent what direction/field of view in the haptic navigation/obstacle detection. This is backed up by an MIT study on haptic navigation which recommended having a tutorial system to let users better learn the haptic system. [15] We envisioned a simple system where on  the voice recognition command of “tutorial” the user would then feel a vibration and a speaker on the cane would tell the user which direction that vibration represents. The system would then repeat the vibrations, with a different vibration pattern, for each 5 motors and tell them what field of view for obstacle detection the vibrations represent. Finally it would vibrate the 5 motors cumulatively, one then two then three etc, while the loudspeaker tells the user what level of battery this relates to.

This addition while seemingly simple introduces some design challenges that would have massively affected the design of the final prototype. One challenge would have to be the addition of the loudspeaker, we would have to conduct testing to see where best to place the speaker so that the user can hear it in loud environments but also not interrupt the other design elements such as haptic feedback in the handle. Secondly the addition of loudspeaker audio then removes our current ‘language neutral’ system- would there need to be additional settings for changing the language and what languages should we initially account for? Should we implement live training? These questions would require further research and user testing outside the scope of this course.