The Ultra Cane was developed in 1998 to help visually impaired users navigate their surroundings. Its interface is in its handle, designed to provide enough information about the user’s immediate environments and to help her or him negotiate them more naturally. The principle behind this object is simple and quite similar to that of the sonar: the handle of the Ultra Cane emits ultrasonic beams to help identify nearby obstacles. The rebounding beams are collected back and translated to the user by virtue of a series of vibrating buttons situated in the handle of the cane. The strength of the pulse of those buttons determines how far away the obstacle is; their position in the handle announces whether the obstacle is on the left or the right of the walker. Impossible for us to understand the world the way blind people do. I think it is unclear whether the Ultra Cane truly improves the lives of the visually impaired significantly more than its low-tech cousin, the white collapsible cane that so many blind people all over the world have been using so successfully until now. The promise of Ultra Cane, though, is the idea of tactile communication, the poetic notion of perceiving the world through the hand. That is, in itself, a valid alternative to the rhythmic motion required from the user to explain the world through a collapsible white cane. We all have that image in our heads. And the sounds that go with it.
