Getting Around

Getting Around is an Android application that lets the visually-impaired navigate the world through sound, either by pinning sounds to places, or by creating audio-trails.

Motivation

So much of Augmented Reality today is focused on the narrow goal of augmented one's visual senses, in the form of digital overalays over camera feeds or transparent displays. I wanted to explore what was possible when an application focused on augmented sound instead of sight. I thought that was interesting because:

  1. Even the most state-of-the-art optical see-through displays have a 40 degree field of view at best. With audio, you can do 360 degree sound spatialization with just two speakers. This means that spatial audio can provide an incredibly high level of immersion.
  2. Thanks to smartphone-based AR solutions like ARCore and ARKit, you can can do localization inexpensively. That provides a platform for deploying applications to large numbers of people.
  3. At the hackathon, I met an amazing team of people. Sunish, a visually-impaired engineer and UX professor wanted to build an AR application for accessibility. The rest of the team was interested in integrating film and design techniques with immersive media. Together, we decided to explore how spatial sound could help with navigation for the blind.

    Implementation

    Our application is an Android app built using ARCore. In its current form it has two main features.