Rendering the world to blind people via spatialized audio

Numerous projects have investigated assistive navigation technologies for the blind community, tackling challenges ranging from interface design to sensory substitution. However, none of these have successfully integrated what we consider to be the three factors necessary for a widely deployable system that delivers a rich experience of one’s environment: implementation on a commodity device, use of a pre-existing worldwide point of interest (POI) database, and a means of rendering the environment that is superior to naive playback of spoken text. Our “In Situ Audio Services” (ISAS) application responds to these needs, allowing users to explore an urban area without necessarily having a particular destination in mind. This research note provides a brief background of the technical and user aspects of the current system, then describes results from a recent qualitative user study, as well as a discussion of likely future paths for the project.