T-Vedo: Ricostruzione Tridimensionale per non Vedenti di opere d’arte pittoriche

The raising awareness of the issue of tactility linked to its aesthetic values and seen as an educational experience for the blind, has fairly recent origins. Whilst early as the eighties the national legislation affirmed the need of removal the architectural barriers in public buildings, only very recently has been taken into account the importance of the “sensory barrier”. The access to the three-dimensional sculptural representations has been the first degree of interaction for the visually impaired in the museum ambient; more recent studies considered the problems of translation and perception of pictorial representations. However, the lack of an organic coordination of the studies and the projects, in this sector, has determined in the last 15 years the multiplication of heterogeneous and largely disorganized actions for ‘tactile language translations of visual images’. Moreover, these tactile reproductions are often handmade by artists, so they result to be extremely costly and time consuming; as a consequence only a very small number of paintings are translated into tactile model. The T-VedO project (tactile 3D reconstruction of paintings for blind and visually impaired people) represents a first attempt to overcome the current state of the art through the study of the users requirements (blind people) and the development of an integrated tool able to semi-automatically transform a single bi-dimensional photo or a paintings into a tactile physical 3D model.