Actually, such a thing already exists. I heard from a friend of mine a nearby museum uses this for paintings, and it also uses sound to indicate the color. Now how cool is that? :)

vandread, if it's a static bas-relief you're talking about, that's not the sort of thing I mean (although it's also a nice device for "looking at" still pictures and paintings). I'm talking about the bas-relief actually moving beneath the hands of the user.

I love the idea but isn't there a lot of movement that would need to be accounted for? Would a blind person be able to *see* everything very quickly with their hands? Ah, I think you have a very cool idea... yes, very cool!!

An interesting extension of this idea might be that the moving surface also becomes a control panel so that pressing on moving high points would be sensed by the computer. This would make a new type of game control for the people who sense with touch which might be a wider audience than non-sighted people.

Nice build-on, Sand. In fact, I can imagine whole new games devoted to just such a controller. But I can't even begin to guess the details of a game like that. I think you'd have to be blind to design it.