Sources Contact Advanced Search Tutorials

An Interest In:

Web News this Week

Search Archive

Some of Our Sources

View All Sources

Help Webnuz

Referal links:

May 30, 2018 01:00 am

HoloLens Can Act As Eyes For Blind Users and Guide Them With Audio Prompts, New Research Shows

New research shows that Microsoft's HoloLens augmented-reality headset works well as a visual prosthesis for the vision impaired, not relaying actual visual data but guiding them in real time with audio cues and instructions. TechCrunch reports: The researchers, from Caltech and University of Southern California, first argue that restoring vision is at present simply not a realistic goal, but that replacing the perception portion of vision isn't necessary to replicate the practical portion. After all, if you can tell where a chair is, you don't need to see it to avoid it, right? Crunching visual data and producing a map of high-level features like walls, obstacles and doors is one of the core capabilities of the HoloLens, so the team decided to let it do its thing and recreate the environment for the user from these extracted features. They designed the system around sound, naturally. Every major object and feature can tell the user where it is, either via voice or sound. Walls, for instance, hiss (presumably a white noise, not a snake hiss) as the user approaches them. And the user can scan the scene, with objects announcing themselves from left to right from the direction in which they are located. A single object can be selected and will repeat its callout to help the user find it. That's all well for stationary tasks like finding your cane or the couch in a friend's house. But the system also works in motion. The team recruited seven blind people to test it out. They were given a brief intro but no training, and then asked to accomplish a variety of tasks. The users could reliably locate and point to objects from audio cues, and were able to find a chair in a room in a fraction of the time they normally would, and avoid obstacles easily as well. Then they were tasked with navigating from the entrance of a building to a room on the second floor by following the headset's instructions. A "virtual guide" repeatedly says "follow me" from an apparent distance of a few feet ahead, while also warning when stairs were coming, where handrails were and when the user had gone off course. All seven users got to their destinations on the first try, and much more quickly than if they had had to proceed normally with no navigation.

Slashdot

Slashdot was originally created in September of 1997 by Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda. Today it is owned by Geeknet, Inc..

More About this Source Visit Slashdot