Exploring braille ambigrams

Last week I posted “Use the best available braille” as an intro to an online braille generator I wrote.  This sparked off a conversation with a friend about the possibility of interpreting braille upside-down.  Writing an ambigram in braille sounded like such a neat idea I wrote a note to myself to explore it later.  Well, today is later, so I set out to see whether it could be done.

This interpretation is a very rigid interpretation of the dot patterns.  Right-side-up and upside-down are perfect 180° rotations from one another.  A dot in the top right corner ends up in the bottom left corner.  Unfortunately, the results are pretty bad, yielding some horrible letters.

braille_ambigrams-full

Or, if we trim it down to just the relevant letters:

braille_ambigrams-trimmed

One realm I have not yet explored is letters that are imperfect grid matches.  If we were to be a little more loose about our letter baselines, there are a few letters that are shape-wise rotations of one another, but the rotation would not not end up on a line that technically counts as a letter.  For instance with this imperfect matching, you can see that G is a rotation of itself, H and D are rotations from one another, J and F are rotations, E and I are rotations.  You could maybe get away with saying B, K, and L are each rotations of themselves.  This letter collection is less awful and opens up some letter opportunities that I may explore at a later time.

Posted in: Puzzle Games

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Brian Enigma

Brian Enigma is a Portlander, manipulator of atoms & bits, minor-league blogger, and all-around great guy. He typically writes about the interesting “maker” projects he's working on, but sometimes veers off into puzzles, software, games, local news, and current events.

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