Dot Pad Wins Best in Show at SXSW Festival

Mar. 15, 2024

Dot. Pad. The first smart tactile graphics display, has been awarded Best in Show at the 25^th Annual SXSW Innovation Awards during SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas. The initiative developed by Dot Inc. in Korea with Serviceplan Innovation and Serviceplan Korea, has won multiple times on the international awards circuit, and the SXSW Innovation Awards represents the pinnacle of awards for technological excellence.  

The SXSW Innovation Awards honour the most exciting and innovative creative developments in the digital world and celebrate a huge range of advances and discoveries in the field of technology.

Most people rely on visuals to understand complex topics, however the 285 million blind and visually impaired people worldwide are left out. Tactile books are scarce, expensive, and impractical. Audio descriptions fail to describe complex information.

Dot Pad. The first smart tactile graphics display for the visually impaired. It can display any visual content from any source. At the core of the Dot Pad is the third generation of the innovative Dot actuator technology. While conventional tactile devices use piezoelectricity to power their braille cells, Dot actuators use electromagnetism, which reduces size, weight, power consumption, and price by more than ten times. This dramatically increases usability and portability while making Dot Pad affordable for majority of the users. It requires intelligence to understand what’s in an image and decide what’s important to the audience.

To create comprehensible tactile content, Dot Pad relies on the innovative Dot Image Processor based on AI. Trained with millions of existing visual and tactile graphics, it can analyze, understand, and segment visual content, and translate it to tactile graphics on the display of 2,400 dots.

There is also a built-in text panel for braille translation. Thanks to a partnership with Apple, Dot Pad integrates seamlessly with iOS and iPadOS, thereby giving users access to the 2.2 million apps on the App Store, out of the box. 

Alexander Schill, Global Chief Creative Officer, Serviceplan Group commented:

"Dot Pad has made a huge impact on the international creative awards circuit, winning at some of the most important festivals including a Grand Prix at Eurobest, a CLIO Grand and Titanium at Cannes Lions. It’s an honour for Dot Pad to be recognised by the SXSW Innovation Festival, which awards the world’s most ground breaking technological advances. Congratulations to our client Dot Inc and our teams at Serviceplan Korea and Serviceplan Innovation, it’s thanks to them that the Dot Pad has disrupted the field of accessibility technology with tactile graphics and provided an affordable and accessible way for the 285 million blind and visually impaired people globally to use a tactile graphics display."