MIT’s BlindAid: Digital cane let’s blind navigate virtual room before the real
We featured the effort of scientists to tame video games to allow the blind navigate through a labyrinth based on audio signals. Now, in an effort pretty similar, developers at MIT’s Touch Lab have created a BlindAid system. This system would assist the visually impaired to familiarize themselves to a new surrounding by feeling the same in a virtual model beforehand.
Mandayam Srinivasan, director of the Touch Lab in collaboration with Carroll Center for the Blind in Newton, Massachusetts is testing the BlindAid built on the MIT’s Phantom device. Phantom is a robotic arm, which creates touch sensation of force on the fingers of the user who holds it like a stylus. So the BlindAid – Phantom combination works the same way, providing real-like sensation of obstacles in the virtual environment.
The BlindAid is connected to a computer programmed with a three-dimensional map of the room, which the blind has to navigate, with this cane like thing, before he is set to take to the actual room. The researchers believe that, when a blind person has a chance to preview a virtual model of a room, he has an easier time navigating way around the actual room later on.
Via: MIT
