The Costa- Hoffman-Meeks minimal surfaces are two such examples I have often cited. Things were seen in the images which triggered deeper insights. These insights were not suspected when viewing the system from the point of view of strictly numbers and equations.

I believe that it can be generally said that viewing an image from the frontier of human knowledge is a "Eureka!" moment -- a moment of enlightenment. This is why I believe images of this type are important to art as well as to science.

The physical objects resulting from these visualizations are artifacts of the historical legacy of CyberSpace. They have been locked within the vacuum of the cathode-ray tube, until we have brought them forth via Automated Fabrication and Rapid Prototyping.

However, another problem in scientific concretization is that the information which constructed the object is left behind in the computer. The abstract universe of discourse becomes disconnected from the object when it becomes physical.

To quickly sum up, here is the situation for our blind scientist: He can use the computer by touch-typing. Text output comes back to him via a voice synthesizer -- his computer can read the screen aloud to him. There are also Braille output buffers, which can capture a single line of text from the computer and display it statically in raised dots.

There are Braille paper embossers, such as the TIGER printer by Viewplus Technologies of Corvallis, Oregon. This is a fairly standard-looking computer printer which can convert a mixture of text and graphics into raised lines and dots on paper. The information quality is about equivalent to a school textbook with ink-lined illustrations. So, work has been done to distribute tactile information over an eleven-by-eleven-inch plane from computer output.

Copyright 1999 (c)