3D printing comes in handy for blind children

"Hands of search" is a magnificent project initiated by Yahoo! Japan, demonstrating once again that3D printing can have curative and educational virtues. At a school for blind children, engineers have built a machine that combines voice recognition search with a 3D printer. The idea behind it is to enable children to feel and touch the outlines of items they can't see. Touch being a primordial sense for the visually impaired. The principle is quite simple: the child presses a button and states something he or she would like to touch (dragons, giraffe, dinosaur, etc.). The machine searches its library of available 3D files. If it finds the object, the child simply presses another button to startprinting the 3D model. For the moment, the "Hands of search" database comprises 110 3D models, but is set to grow thanks to contributions from individuals and companies.

Source : Creativity