Contribution of Augmented Reality Solutions to Assist Visually Impaired People in Their Mobility

Author(s):  
Benoît Froissard ◽  
Hubert Konik ◽  
Alain Trémeau ◽  
Éric Dinet
Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (9) ◽  
pp. 3061
Author(s):  
Alice Lo Valvo ◽  
Daniele Croce ◽  
Domenico Garlisi ◽  
Fabrizio Giuliano ◽  
Laura Giarré ◽  
...  

In recent years, we have assisted with an impressive advance in augmented reality systems and computer vision algorithms, based on image processing and artificial intelligence. Thanks to these technologies, mainstream smartphones are able to estimate their own motion in 3D space with high accuracy. In this paper, we exploit such technologies to support the autonomous mobility of people with visual disabilities, identifying pre-defined virtual paths and providing context information, reducing the distance between the digital and real worlds. In particular, we present ARIANNA+, an extension of ARIANNA, a system explicitly designed for visually impaired people for indoor and outdoor localization and navigation. While ARIANNA is based on the assumption that landmarks, such as QR codes, and physical paths (composed of colored tapes, painted lines, or tactile pavings) are deployed in the environment and recognized by the camera of a common smartphone, ARIANNA+ eliminates the need for any physical support thanks to the ARKit library, which we exploit to build a completely virtual path. Moreover, ARIANNA+ adds the possibility for the users to have enhanced interactions with the surrounding environment, through convolutional neural networks (CNNs) trained to recognize objects or buildings and enabling the possibility of accessing contents associated with them. By using a common smartphone as a mediation instrument with the environment, ARIANNA+ leverages augmented reality and machine learning for enhancing physical accessibility. The proposed system allows visually impaired people to easily navigate in indoor and outdoor scenarios simply by loading a previously recorded virtual path and providing automatic guidance along the route, through haptic, speech, and sound feedback.


CICTP 2020 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ammar Muhammad ◽  
Qizhou Hu ◽  
Muhammad Tayyab ◽  
Yikai Wu ◽  
Muhammad Ahtsham

Author(s):  
Olga Novikova ◽  

The special library acts as the cultural and educational center for visually impaired people, and as the center for continuing education. The multifunctional performance of the library is substantiated. The joint projects accomplished in cooperation with theatres and museums and aimed at integrating the visually impaired people into the society are described. Advanced training projects for the library professionals accomplished in 2018 are discussed.


Author(s):  
Heather Tilley ◽  
Jan Eric Olsén

Changing ideas on the nature of and relationship between the senses in nineteenth-century Europe constructed blindness as a disability in often complex ways. The loss or absence of sight was disabling in this period, given vision’s celebrated status, and visually impaired people faced particular social and educational challenges as well as cultural stereotyping as poor, pitiable and intellectually impaired. However, the experience of blind people also came to challenge received ideas that the visual was the privileged mode of accessing information about the world, and contributed to an increasingly complex understanding of the tactile sense. In this chapter, we consider how changing theories of the senses helped shape competing narratives of identity for visually impaired people in the nineteenth century, opening up new possibilities for the embodied experience of blind people by impressing their sensory ability, rather than lack thereof. We focus on a theme that held particular social and cultural interest in nineteenth-century accounts of blindness: travel and geography.


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