A group of elementary and middle school students from districts east of Seattle are working together on a project to help visually impaired people experience paintings in museums through tactile displays.
The team, called 42 Watts, is based in Bellevue, Wash., and features seven kids from schools in that city as well as Issaquah, Redmond and the Northshore district. The students are: Aakash Abraham, 11; Amogh Kalra, 12; Anya Rajyaguru, 13; Arisha Rajyaguru 12; Namita Rao, 11; Rishabh Rao, 12; and Ayaan Thaker, 12.
The students are regulars in FIRST LEGO League, a robotics program that introduces kids to science, technology, engineering, and math challenges and competitions. Last year the team won the state championship for Washington and competed at the world championships in May with a project called SolarRollar, which was an automated AI-based approach to cleaning solar panels and in turn increasing their efficiency.
This year’s challenge is called “Masterpiece” and involves innovative ways to marry art and technology and solve real-world problems.
Team 42 Watts came up with a project called Reliefeelable, which uses software, hardware, artificial intelligence and more to generate a tactile version of a painting in real time. The displays can be used by individuals who are blind or otherwise visually impaired, to touch and explore art pieces within a museum setting. Audio descriptions of works are also generated using chatbots such as ChatGPT, to add to the experience.
Almost 20 million Americans have some form of visual impairment in the U.S., and 42 Watts team member Rishabh Rao, a seventh grader at Odle Middle School in Bellevue, said working on a problem that could potentially impact the lives of so many people was difficult to wrap his head around.
“It really shows you how we have so many things we take for granted that are not accessible to a lot of people,” said Rishabh, who thinks he may want to work in robotics engineering some day.
‘I look forward to these kids growing up and guiding us further in their pursuits.’
— Greg Robinson, chief curator, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art
For help and guidance along the way, the team has talked to a number of experts across art and technology, including the Shape Lab at Stanford University; the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Science; AI experts at Google; ArtTech Foundation; ArtsFund; and more.
Nikhil Thaker is an advisor to 42 Watts and father of team member Ayaan Thaker. He said he’s watched the kids put in hard work on the project, struggle with new problems, find alternative solutions, and grow in the process.
“I have seen a paradigm shift in the kids’ attitude along the way,” Thaker told GeekWire. “[They] started off wanting to design an award-winning solution to win championships, but I observed that the impact potential made the team passionate about making the solution pragmatic for implementation.”
He said 42 Watts is now focused on incremental improvements to Reliefeelable and actually enhancing accessibility to art.
That goal has played out at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, where four paintings from the museum’s permanent art collection are on display in tandem with the students’ accessibility solution.
The project fit into BIMA’s mission around diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility and was first tested with a local group called Bainbridge Island Visually Impaired Persons Support Group.
The artworks on display vary in content, perspective, and perceived depths of various scenes, ranging from more cartoon or fantasy-like to more a realistic landscape. The kids were involved in selecting the variety of paintings, so they could explore different problems in their project, according to Greg Robinson, chief curator at BIMA.
The display, located near a museum classroom, includes the paintings, a 3D-printed tactile version of the artwork (on a much smaller scale), a recording that introduces the artwork to help guide the visitor in their tactile journey, and video with the kids explaining their project goals and solutions.
Robinson said visually impaired visitors experience the world on a highly varied spectrum of sight, and that has been a big part of the assessment and discussions. Some people had sight previously and have lots of visual memory, some still see to varying degrees including color, and some blind persons rely on previous life information, and rely totally on the tactile experience.
“This project is realizing how diverse the sighted world is, and the kids are totally excited about how complex their inquiry has become, and also how they have made a great start to understanding that,” Robinson said via email. “The visual arts world is isolated from how visually impaired persons experience our world, and we have so much to learn here. I look forward to these kids growing up and guiding us further in their pursuits. It is both exciting and humbling.”
