5:44am March 5, 2013

One of those dreams about something you wish could exist.

Just before writing this, I had a dream about a cool art form. It was the sort of thing that could almost exist in the real world but not quite.

It was this big scene sketched in a simple style, black on white. The paper was thick, and the lines in the sketches were sort of embossed onto it, so they stuck out of the paper and you could feel them with your fingertips even if you couldn’t see them. So it was accessible to blind people.

But here was the fantastical element: if you pushed around each element with your finger, you could either move it around, or it would do something of its own. So if you pushed a lamp post, it would move side to side across the paper, or wobble a bit. But if you pushed a dog, it would shift position a little and bark.

But for some reason the two coolest items by far were an umbrella and a piece of folded newspaper. You could explore the entire, huge drawing by pushing those around as they flew through the air tumbling head over heels, or tumbled on the ground. They also could interact with every single other object in the drawings.

I’m certain it would be possible, of course, to program something like this to work on an iPad, or in a Flash game of some sort. But what made it truly magical was that it happened on paper. And not just a flat drawing on paper. But a drawing where each black line was raised, so you could feel it under your fingers. And that made it not only something you could do without having to use your eyes at all. But also something more out of fantasy than science fiction or even modern computer programming.

It felt exactly like art made of raised lines on paper would be – only animated and interactive like an iPad game would be. Or on the other hand, it felt exactly like animated art or a game on an iPad – only it was raised lines on paper. As either a static drawing in raised lines on paper, or a simple computer or iPad game, it would be pretty meaningless. It was the combination of things, rather than one or the other, that made it awesome enough to write down when I woke up. Plus it was automatically blind-accessible.

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