Project Description
“Heritouch”, a portmanteau combining “heritage” and “touch”, denotes what we do. Noticing that most cultural heritage is inaccessible to the visually impaired, we decided to make heritage touchable and hearable. Our members were total strangers to each other when we first formed the team for a course project. Nevertheless, our synergy, ideas, and early prototypes successfully impressed judges of a national social venture competition in South Korea. With the prize, we have grown into a startup that makes interactive teaching aid for the visually impaired.
For now, we have continued to improve our product based on interviews, user study, and HCI research. We have also connected with schools for the blind seeking to support them with our models for history class. As makers, we organized joint workshops with the US Embassy Seoul to encourage female participation in STEM. The workshops have yet a more important goal: to raise awareness for the overlooked needs of the visually impaired. For us, technology can be a means to care for minority groups in our society.
I was actively engaged in our work from March 2018 to March 2019. I am still a member of the team, but I have become less involved in business development.
Advisor(s)
Professor Ahn, Jaehong, PhD, Invited Professor at the Graduate School of Culture Technology, KAIST
Publication(s)
M. Kim, P. Y. Lai, K. Kim, D. Yang, and J. Ahn, “HERITOUCH: A 3D-Printed Audio-Tactile Cultural Heritage for the Visually Impaired,” in International Conference on Intelligent Human Systems Integration 2019 (Poster Demonstration Sessions), 2019.
See more
- Winning the 2018 Social Venture Regional Contest IBD Lab News. August 14th, 2018.
- Winning the 2018 Social Venture National Contest IBD Lab News. September 19th, 2018.
- Attending IHSI 2019 Conference in San Diego, USA IBD Lab News. February 23rd, 2019.