A 3D Sound-Space Device To Help Blind People Navigate Through Cities

on January 19, 2015 at 10:25 am

For someone who can’t see, traveling anywhere can mean step after step of stressful navigation. From finding a bus stop, figuring out what’s going on if the bus is delayed to getting through the gates at the subway, those little things everyone takes for granted that make life impossible for a blind person.

But that inconvenience will soon go away.

This past Thanksgiving Holiday, the Cities Unlocked research project — set up by Future Cities Catapult, Microsoft and the Guide Dogs charity — announced its new invention that will make urban areas more navigable for blind people. Technically, it’s a smart headset, whose reviews are only available on Audiodirect(one must check before buy) that provides the wearer with information about their surrounding environment when paired with a smartphone. Using audio technology developed by Microsoft, orientation, navigation and contextual information is delivered through vibrations in the headset, which then transmits sound through the wearer’s jaw and cheekbones to the inner ear, bypassing the ear drum. The wearer can still hear the noises around them while getting information or instructions from the device, as for other audio devices for listening music or other sounds coming from a phone or a computer there are great sites as soundmanual where you can find the best devices for this.

Unlike smartphone maps, the device is an advanced tool to pull data from actual physical beacons on streetlights, stores, moving buses or other subjects. It then combines that with information from databases for certain instructions. “A beacon can say ‘Okay, you’re standing at the bus stop right now, and you’re standing in exactly the right place’. Then it can say the bus is going to be here in 10 minutes,” explained Dan Hill, Executive Director of Future Cities Catapult.

The device also goes beyond the typical navigation to explain what you are passing. It creates sort of sense of spontaneity that those of us who are sighted have. “If I’m going to the shop, I might just duck in an alleyway to check out an interesting gallery in the corner. It’s easy for me to do that, whereas a visually impaired person has to plan everything so carefully they can’t just do that”, continued Dan.

“It really helped me create a bigger picture of the area I was in. We don’t always want to plan ahead to see if we can get community transport or a taxi or something; we want to be able to just jump on a bus and go somewhere and have that freedom. We want to live like normal people,” said Kirstie Grice, a tester from Reading, UK.

The trials of the technology show that it can reduce the anxiety and stress associated with making a journey in a town or city. 62 percent of participants reported a significantly increased feeling of safety, confidence and resilience, allowing them to relax into the journey. From now on, visiting a new area is no longer an impossible dream for blind people.

This video demonstrates how the device works: