Astonish

Project description

Problem

Visually impaired and blind people come from all kinds of backgrounds. Many are elderly, some are young. They may be sportsmen and women, gardeners, farmers, chess players, teachers, typists, musicians, lawyers, housewives, computer programmers, physiotherapists, social workers, telephonists, parents……
Such people have many abilities and can achieve many things despite visual impairment or blindness, but there are times when they will appreciate and welcome practical assistance. According to the Guide Dogs charity, around 180,000 visually impaired people in the UK rarely leave their house alone. By 2050, the number of people with visual impairment is set to double to around four million, as the population ages.

Solution

To provide 3D sound navigating system for visually impaired people. Using Augmented Reality for blind people and replacing sound to vision can help them create the picture of surrounding in their brain and reduce their dependency. Images are converted into sound by scanning them from left to right while associating elevation with pitch and brightness with loudness. With the vOICe system, a camera scans a scene. Software then converts the images into the soundscapes, a series of noises transmitted to the headphones at the rate of roughly one per second.

Visual information from objects to the wearer’s left and right are fed into the left and right ears respectively. Bright objects are louder, and the sound frequency denotes whether an object is high up or low down in the visual field. Users become familiar with how images sound, enabling them to identify shapes. The system works both for people who have become blind and for those born blind, who can use it to experience what vision is like for the first time.