Using augmented reality to support the understanding of three-dimensional concepts by blind people

Seeing and describing real and imaginary three-dimensional scenes from the observer’s viewpoint is an intuitive activity for non-impaired people, but it is difficult for congenitally blind people, once it involves abstract concepts for them, such as: perspective, depth planes, occlusion, etc. This paper discusses the problem related to understanding three-dimensional concepts by blind people and presents physical environments and procedures supported by an augmented reality tool in order to help blind people to understand, describe and convert threedimensional scenes into two-dimensional embossed representations, like painting. To verify how the blind people can acquire those concepts, we developed an augmented reality application, working as an audio spatial tutor to make the perspective learning process easy. That application was tested with ten congenitally blind people, who understood the perspective concepts and made comments about the experience. Finally, we discuss the learning method and technical aspects, pointing out directions to improve the augmented reality application and ways to release it.