Visual Orientation for the Blind

The vOICe for Windows « The vOICe Home Page
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This page contains a number of orientation related examples. A panoramic set of photographs was created by standing still and then turning around over 360 degrees in 16 steps. Continuously getting visual feedback from distant landmarks and skylines may help in orientation and mobility, wayfinding, and at the same time help avoid veering while crossing large open areas! The vOICe mobile technology targets real-time synthetic vision for use in "blind navigation" by mapping live camera views from a wearable system into corresponding complex sounds that help improve 3D situation awareness and allow the blind user to mentally visualize the surrounding terrain, complementing any optional use of talking GPS navigation systems and/or sonar devices. The soundscapes were created with The vOICe for Windows and afterwards the saved .wav files were converted into MP3 to reduce the file size for downloading. Click on any image link to load the corresponding stereo soundscape into your media player. Each MP3 sound sample file is only a 18K download.


1
. Empty parking place with trees and houses in the background. Ground is low-pitched and sky is high-pitched.

2
. A white two-story building comes into view as we turn to the right. You can hear the window rhythm on your right.

3
. More windows (about eight per story) enter our view. The low and lowering pitch of the ground is indicative of visual perspective.

4
. Now we turn to the right end of this building. A slowing rhythm usually means that those parts of the building are closer.

5
. We hear the right end of the building on our left, with and a pedestrian passage sounds low-pitched on our right side.

6
. The pedestrian passage in the center of the view. The white pillars of another building to the right of this passage add a new rhythm.

7
. Five pillars in view. Notice the rhythm slowing down for pillars that are nearby: a clear consequence of visual perspective.

8
. One pillar in view, plus the optical reflection of the earlier building in the window panes.

9
. The rightmost pillar in the center of our view, and at some distance a shed with grated door on your right.

10
. Another grated door of the shed nearby. The grating gives a fast rhythm. A high-piched moving tone delineates the roof of the shed.

11
. The outer wall of the shed and a street section, plus a small piece of high-pitched sky.

12
. Same, with houses on the other side of the street and a low-pitched pavement.

13
. Looking over the pavement into a street: there we hear most of the bright high-pitched sky. A tree hides the sky on your far right.

14
. Part of parking place with houses on the far side. The high-pitched sky is interrupted by two trees. The low-pitched ground area is interrupted by the nearby dark tree trunk.

15
. Interruption of low-pitched ground and high-pitched sky by nearby dark tree trunk. Houses and parked car on the far side of the parking place.

16
. Parking place with a few cars on the far side and houses beyond that. Low-pitched sound structure due to a ground-level metal fence.

Make sure that your media player runs in autorepeat mode such that you can listen to each soundscape a number of times. With Microsoft Windows Media Player 9 and 10 you can toggle the repeat mode via Control T or via the menu Play | Repeat. With the older Microsoft Windows Media Player 6.4 you can go to the menu View | Options, select the Playback tab and then select "Repeat forever".

88K WAV soundscape: Hand reaching out to a cup on a table ``Called vOICe, the software runs on a regular notebook PC and is being designed to integrate with hand-held GPS systems when they come on the market. Dr. Meijer envisions the user of his device guided by GPS and speech software to the door of a building, then prompted about the location of the knob by the finely tuned camera view. He says the technology will allow a user to accurately grasp a cup of coffee just set down on a table.'' From the July 10, 2003 edition of The Christian Science Monitor, Computers & Technology section, in an article by Lakshmi Sandhana titled  "Seeing-eye and navigation technologies mean more freedom for the blind, A hand-held device that reads GPS signals, and one with a mini-camera, promise big advances".

Other MP3 sound samples can be found on the Walk towards Fence page, the Blindsight of a Parked Car page, the Hearing a Printed Graph page, the The vOICe of America page, the Planet Saturn page, the Access Symbol page and the Television for the Blind page.

WMV video - street walk, 14 MB file

As a further illustration of The vOICe soundscapes in an orientation and mobility context, you can download a 14 MB (about twenty two minutes, 89 Kbps) single-shot video clip (Microsoft WMV format) of a walk along the streets of Eindhoven in The Netherlands. Note that the video quality is deliberately visually degraded as it crudely indicates the visual information that gets encoded in the one-second soundscape scan for each video frame.

Copyright © 1996 - 2024 Peter B.L. Meijer