Since the beginning, Ford’s mission is to work everyday to make mobility and its beauty available for everyone. Even to those who have never had the chance to enjoy a car trip before.

An estimated 285 million people in the world are visually impaired. With ‘Feel the View’ we wanted to start for these people a new era of innovative technologies, allowing all of them to get to know the world out there in a different way.

To reach our mission we needed to develop not just a device, but a new language. A language that would allow the blind to experience the surroundings not via a description, as the braille, but through a real representation of reality. To do that we teamed up with the Views International association, a charity pledged to help visually impaired people, and stepped right into the blind shoes. Then, in the development phase, we took aboard Aedo, a digital engineering studio specialized in visually impaired projects.

After one year of research and development, we created Feel the View: a unique device that turns car windows into a tactile screen for the blind. Feel the View transforms the landscape into vibrations transmitted on the car windows, allowing the visually impaired to ‘see’ the view through their fingertips. Plus, the different sounds of the vibrations help the blind to recognize a shape of the elements forming the view.

The device was first developed by Ford of Italy but soon after it was picked-up and supported globally by the brand. Feel the View was released online and spread worldwide in no time. The news was covered by hundreds of TV channels (among which CNN, FOX10, TG1, SKY TG24) and magazines (including The Sunday Times, The Sun, The Independent, la Repubblica, Fortune, Bild) from 150 different countries, pitching over 45M organic impression in 48 hours and 70 M totally.

Final result: over € 2M earned media, an enhancement for the brand across the whole globe and a great change on how the blind people live car trips for good.