Adrian Rodriguez built DreamLinks, tactile 3D tools for blind children to create spatial worlds. He critiques synthetic speech's limits for accessibility and explains how magnetic pieces and IoT let kids design in Roblox and other 3D spaces. The product launches later this year.
Chapters
Group theory created some technology, and it's technology we never brought to market, but my goal was how do we get blind people to go beyond the template? So the problem with interpreting a computer through synthetic speech is it does not tell you the relative size and position of elements on screen. The only way around that is tactility. It's just a different form of media. And so at the time, I was working on IoT systems, right? AMPA works with IoT cameras. There's a whole other— guys, there's startups that I just didn't even put up here that were like arcs in themselves. But suffice to say, I spent a lot of time working with WebSockets, and I knew what could be done. I knew what could be done with QR codes. I knew what could be done with WebSockets. And I thought, you can pretty much entangle anything with a browser. Why not just make websites? And so we did this. And then I went to Street Code. I started teaching Roblox, and I saw the value of 3D. I thought, OK, how do I get my kids to make 3D worlds? Because this is a phenomenon, right? Over half of kids 4 to 12 play Minecraft. It's really, right, like a cultural phenomenon crucial for development. Parents believe that it helps with spatial reasoning, something that's key for blind people, collaborative problem solving, etc. Minecraft is great. Kids love to build things. How do we get blind kids to create 3D worlds when even creating 2D layouts is really prohibitive given the current paradigm of synthetic speech? So what you're seeing here is my co-founder Gabe build a simple 3D platformer. This is actually the official Roblox curriculum that we teach at freeCodeAcademy. Game Design 1 is you basically build Super Mario 64, an obstacle course with a spawn point, a checkpoint, some hazards, and a win point. And even in Roblox Studio, which is a hyper simple way to do it, you still need to dive into a file directory. You still need to move assets around to do such simple, such simple things. And I found that most kids just end up fighting with Roblox Studio, and they spend just a fraction of time actually designing a fun game, trying to think about what would be a fun jump. And we have not tuned the physics, so pardon us for not being good at our own game. But so the reality is that you can actually just map these movesets. And so it is augmented reality. It works with your phone as well. And so again, simple moveset. Emerges to a really wide range of creations. And so that's what these are. We call them DreamLinks. And they're quite strong. We have been working on them for a long time. They have these magical magnets that attach in any direction. And guys, people always talk about startups. What is a truth that you believe that everyone else disagrees with? I think Legos suck. For real, like, I struggled so hard with Legos as a kid. They're small. If you put a bunch of 2x4s, you can't add anything to the side. I know they have cubes. I'm actually currently running a study interviewing a lot of blind kids on creativity, and we all struggle with LEGO. And so next. So this is DreamLinks, and we are launching later this year. We basically have a variety of fun things in store. We're excited to show you more when we can.
