Feel the magic Snapwire / Alamy Stock Photo

People who are visually impaired miss out at firework displays. But a new prototype system lets them sense the explosions via touch.

Feeling Fireworks, created by Paul Beardsley of Disney Research in Zurich, Switzerland, and his colleagues, relies on five jets that fire patterns of water at the back of a large screen on which users place their hands. The resulting vibrations mimic expanding dots of light.

“For rockets, one feels pulses of vibration that travel up the tactile screen with stronger vibrational explosions at the apex,” says Beardsley. For Catherine wheels, vibrations move in a spiral pattern.


“We want blind, visually impaired, and sighted people to all try Feeling Fireworks, and to depart with a shared and enjoyable memory of a fireworks evening,” he says.

At the moment, the touch firework show is a standalone event. But as nearly all public firework displays are run by computers the team hope to eventually synchronise it with an event’s main display.

The system was designed with help from the Swiss Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired. “But the design itself was only tested on sighted people – perhaps the next step for this group would be to test it with blind users,” says Sriram Subramanian at the University of Sussex.

Feeling Fireworks currently has two modes of operation. With the first, you start your hands at the base of the screen and then move your hands to follow and locate the fireworks. In the second, users start with their hands inside an ellipse placed in the centre of the screen. The main explosions happen in this region, with the possibility to explore elsewhere to feel other parts of the firework.

The second approach doesn’t require quite as much orientation, but loses some elements of finding the fireworks for yourself. The team plan to test both approached to find out which people prefer.

The project was demonstrated at the User Interface Software and Technology conference this month.