Product 018 CELL
Luminix
An 8-cell braille reader. Read digital text with your fingertips.
Luminix — 8-cell braille reader
Why it matters
Until now you had to pick just one.
Devices that read well are heavy and expensive. Devices that are light barely read at all.
Braille notetakers
They read and write, but the weight and price make daily carry impractical.
Heavy and expensiveBraille smartwatches
Light, but four cells break even a single word apart.
Barely readable0%
"The price is out of reach" — survey of 33 blind users
0%
"It is hard to connect to my other devices"
0%
"It is hard to carry every day"
Our answer
Readable, affordable, portable. All three.
Actually readable
Eight cells let you read words without breaking them apart — twice a 4-cell watch.
8 cells
Within reach
Instead of a ₩6M notetaker, we are targeting a price you can actually start with.
250K KRW
Carry it every day
Latching cells hold their state with no power at all. One battery lasts the day.
0 mW to hold
The companion app
Beyond reading: listen and find your way.
Luminix works together with an app. The screens below are not mock-ups: each one was captured while actually operating the app that is deployed right now. All three features can be tried on the on-screen braille strip with no device at all.
Read
The whole sentence at once, broken at word boundaries.
Slicing every eight cells breaks the standard. How the text is cut is very nearly the whole feature.
Never transcribed word by word
Roman letters inside a Korean sentence need an opening and a closing Roman-letter sign around them. Lift a word out on its own and the engine cannot see what surrounds it, so those signs are lost. Measured: in ‘오늘 회의는 Zoom 으로 합니다’ the word Zoom takes seven cells when the sentence is transcribed whole, and shrinks to five with the signs gone when the word is transcribed alone. Across five mixed sentences the two methods agreed on only two. The word Station behaves the same way in reverse: five cells inside this English sentence, seven inside a Korean one.
The break falls on a word, not on a cell count
The 2024 revision of the Korean braille standard uses contractions, so several syllables can pack into a single cell. Cutting by cell count splits a contraction in half and it stops being readable. So the break falls only on a blank cell, and a single word is divided only when it alone runs past eight cells.
The dots on screen are the bytes the device receives
One cell is one byte and dot 1 is bit 0. The on-screen simulator and the Bluetooth device build the frame through the same code, so the pattern you see without a device is the pattern that reaches your fingertip with one.
You set the pace, not the app
Reading braille by touch varies several times over with practice, so it is not a value the app can pick. The interval lives in settings, and the button appears in the reading screen only for people who turned it on. Pressing previous or next at any moment hands control straight back.
Listen
Never streamed live, written down first.
Speech outruns a reading fingertip by three to seven times. Pushed through as it arrives, braille can never be caught up with.
Speech runs five syllables a second; touch reads about one
The gap runs three to seven times over, so streaming live would back the buffer up permanently. Speech is written down first, and the pace is set by the user’s own button presses.
Unconfirmed words never reach the cells
Interim recognition results keep changing while a sentence is still being spoken. Sent straight through, the dots under a fingertip would shake along with every guess. Interim text stays on screen, dimmed, and only confirmed sentences are cut into cells.
A short silence is not a fault
A browser stops listening after a few seconds of quiet. The app does not report that as an error; it quietly starts listening again. If a three-second pause raised a warning and made ‘Listening. Go ahead.’ disappear, the user would believe the session had dropped while it was in fact still running.
Blocked inputs are not greyed out
Translucency actively hurts low-vision readers, so a blocked row is not faded. It simply drops emphasis and states the reason in words. When only a permission is missing, the reason is replaced by a button that opens the settings page, so a blocked row never becomes a dead end.
Navigate
Direction in braille, distance in vibration.
Direction and distance together overrun eight cells: ‘우회전 50m’ (turn right, 50 m) takes twelve. So the two axes were split apart.
Distance arrives as a rhythm
The Vibration API has no intensity control, only on and off. Pulse length stands in for strength instead, while the silent gaps are left untouched. Stretching the gaps as well would smear the rhythm that separates far from near.
The words were chosen to fit eight cells
‘횡단보도’ (crosswalk) measures nine cells, so it was shortened to ‘횡단’ at five; ‘엘리베이터’ is nine, so ‘승강기’ at seven is used instead. Every word was measured with the transcription engine rather than guessed. An unknown turn code falls back to ‘straight’ rather than inventing a direction.
A step advances when you do, not when a clock does
Satellite positioning in a city is off by 5 to 20 metres, which is wider than a footpath. Announcing a turn on a timer, before the walker has reached it, can put them into a road. That is why the auto-advance used by reading and listening is the one thing navigation does not get.
The map belongs to whoever is looking on
It is drawn for a companion or a low-vision user to look at. The same information already goes out as text and braille, so the map is hidden from screen readers entirely and keyboard focus is kept from being trapped inside it. The safety notice sits above the search box.
Reading, listening, and navigation run straight from Chrome. Reading phone notifications in braille, and translating English into Korean, run in the Android app.
Try the Luminix app →
You can try it with on-screen braille, even without the device.