Showing faces to blind people has been a challenge I have been trying to research and resolve for many years. When a face is transferred into a 2D or a 3D form and features are made so that the are enjoyable through a tactile experience, a lot is lost that is still available when looking at a live human, or a photo.
While there are many tactile representations of people, there is much less information about how recognizable those pictures, statues or 3D replicas are.
One of the major difficulties is that blind people do not have a large number of faces they have touched or experienced in any way so that there is much less of a comparison. For example the difference between ages, races or facial expressions. Therefore, when it comes to recognition, the first distinction we have to make is if a blind person was born blind or lost their vision later on in life. Someone who has seen many faces before, would more likely know what to look for, but a person who is born blind probably has touched many more hands than faces, at least in a western cultural setting where a handshake is an everyday form of communication.
So, first of all, for a good understanding of faces, it would be necessary to provide a thorough explanation of what faces look like, what are the differences, or in the first place, what to look for.
Since I am a blind person myself who was born completely blind, I will not go into this detail, rather, I will detail my personal experience.
Once I had an idea to extend our 3D services to make photos or 3D replicas of faces. The experiment was short lived. I started printing a 3D photo of my father, it was only half way done, when my daughter walked into the printing room and said: oh that’s grandpa. Ok, not bad for the first try, it was recognizable. But when it was done, for the touch, to me it didn’t resemble to my father. For that matter, it didn’t resemble to anyone, it was a 3D printed picture of a face, and the mustache gave it away that it was a man. Then we tried to make a 3D head, just like the head of a statue. Same thing, it was the head of a man, any man, but absolutely recognizable to my sighted children.
So I had to take a step back: could we make replicas of faces in 2D or 3D? Absolutely. But would it be meaningful? I am not sure.
Then I started questioning how useful are publicly exhibited accessible 2D or 3D models of faces. But I think it is the wrong question. The problem is not with the replica, but with the lack of explanation. If you tell me for example, and I’m just randomly coming up with something, it is a picture of a 40 year old, oriental woman. Depending on my tactile experiences, I may not even know what does a 40 year old person look like compared to a 20 year old, how does an oriental person facially differ from a Caucasian person, and for that matter, unless there is facial hair involved, I wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell if it was a man or a woman.
Now for someone who had functional vision before and they remember it, those answers would be obvious, the question would be that at a detail that is a good tactile experience would all those features come across.
As I was thinking about a solution for this problem, it happened that I traveled to Philadelphia and I had a chance to visit the Signers’ Hall, where 42 live size bronze statues recreate the last day of the constitutional convention. First I went to visit the Signer’s Hall as a general interest, but during my stay, I returned one more time, with the only purpose of touching faces.
I had a guide from the museum who came with me, and as I was touching the faces, she explained what she could see on them, for example the age of the person, and she also explained to me in greater detail how she comes to each conclusion.
I probably touched more faces that day than altogether in my entire life. The few faces I have touched were family members or close friends, and mostly not for the sake of a cultural or artistic experience so the experience is not comparable. Also, all the 42 statues were Caucasian males, so it didn’t give me a good global perspective, but in the meantime gave me a wider understanding of faces of white men where comparing the differences was more streamlined.
My takeaway is that making faces accessible in 2D or 3D for blind people is not sufficient on their own. They should be coupled with a description, just like in case of 3D printed buildings, and the description should be thorough and state even the obvious facts, as we cannot be sure how much experience does the viewer have with understanding faces, or if they experienced vision previously.
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