Yes, I believe it is faked. I worked in the braille community for years and micro-actuators that actually work are like a holy grail. If they had one that actually worked, they would be plastering their site with descriptions of their new world changing mirco-actuation mechanism. They don't show a real video of it actuating. It just makes no sense. Its like if you invented fusion power and spent the entire time showing videos of smiling kids next to dish washers, and never even tried to explain the breakthrough for the containment material.
For those who think that it shouldn't be that hard: "actually works" means that you can make an actuator in relatively low quantities that
- is smal, ideally the distance between Braille dots or about (distance within a character is smaller than that between dots in different characters) 2.5 mm by 2.5 mm, with a height of less than 2cm or so,
- can lift a dot by about 1mm (from definitely not above the surface to 0.9mm above it),
- withstands a force of about .3N (30 grams),
- can be switched while the user exerts that 30 gram force on it,
- will work for 10^6 actuations,
- works reliably in the presence of dirt, grease and human sweat,
- doesn't require enormous amounts of power (piezo-electric Braille cells only need power when switching),
- is safe when users (almost) touch them with their bare fingers (piezo-electric cells use 200V or so to switch, but that is at a few cm from the Braille pins),
- can be produced for a few dollars (you need 8 for a Braille cell or 160 for a 20-character display, so it adds up). If your goal is to make a full page (say 8000 pins) $1 each already is too much.
You also wil like want to switch 500 of these in 0.1s or so.
Especially if you forget about the desired reliability and/or limit the force or the travel, the problem gets a lot easier.
I think the videos that these guys posted are real, but wonder how long this device will keep working.
The video helps, since the watch face shown on the web page has only 2.5 braille characters to each side of the divider line. I was wondering how that could possibly work, but in the video, there are 18 dots, or three full characters, to each side of the line.
