Tactile access for blind people to virtual reality on the World Wide Web

This paper reports work in progress at BT Labs to investigate the use of haptic display as a component of an emerging de facto standard (VRML) for the display of three dimensional images on the WWW. We discuss the use of a simple haptic interface to provide access to three dimensional virtual images. This is based on our experience of developing a browser capable of driving a force feedback probe from a VRML file.