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How it StartedThe first BATS prototype was designed by five undergraduate students under the guidance of Professor Gray Bishop at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in the spring of 2002. The project idea stemmed from a chance meeting on campus between Dr. Bishop and Jason Morris, a visually impaired graduate student in the classics department. Dr. Bishop's long-running interest in assistive technology, Jason's difficulty in working with tactile maps in his research, and the team's motivation to work on a worthwhile project all lead to the development of an initial prototype. Collaboration with the Ancient World Mapping Center at UNC kick-started the project with data for a map of ancient England complete with 393 ancient city names, ancient city types, modern city names, and distances as well as 307,200 point elevations. BATS made this rich set of data accessible to Jason so that he was could gain a keen awareness of its content--keen enough to write a paper relating distances between settlements and the structure of Roman government at its time of occupation. BATS: Roman Britain
In a typical session with the BATS: Roman Britain prototype, a user uses a mouse, trackball, or tablet input device to move a pointer over the map. The numeric keypad on the keyboard is used to perform a number of actions such as listening to environmental sounds in a given compass direction from the user's current position, requesting the spelling of a given city's name, and querying a settlement's type. BATS: North Carolina
As a user explores the map of North Carolina, she is immersed in an environment of real-time sounds and textures. She can move towards regions of interest based on the direction of their iconic sounds. For example, sounds of birds chirping that come from the left indicate that a forest is nearby to the west. Furthermore, she receives information through tactile feedback. Cities, for instance, cause a tactile mouse or gamepad to vibrate when the cursor hovers over these regions of importance. Once the user nears her destination, information about local landmarks becomes available. A click of a button prompts local landmarks to announce their names from their respective directions. Another button provides detailed information about ther user's current location; for example: name, population, area, and perimeter can be queried on demand. |