Let me provide some feedback. There is a common misconception that most blind people are 100% blind. That's not true. Most blind people fall into a spectrum of "low-vision," where we can see some things. This also adds into unique discrimination against the "invisibly blind" (e.g. bumping into people, and them getting mad because you are not visibly blind).

Connecting this with your project, I think a good low hanging fruit is to focus your glasses on alerting people visually. For many blind people, the issue is that we have a smaller field of vision or very blurry focus, and bolding images would go a long way. One example is just having a machine learning computer vision program create a bold red box around obstacles so that it is highlighted to us. To use myself as an example, I actually use my phone camera to see. My phone camera relays images to me much clearer than my eyes can, so like walking around I just hold my phone out and look into it. Glasses that does that more naturally would be amazing.

But of course, helping the 100% blind is helpful as well, and for that, vibration would be best. The blind have the same emotions as the sighted, and we feel embarassed or intrusive if our accomodations create a hassle for others. Loud sounds would be too intrusive, so we would unlikely use such a device. Vibrations are subtle. I'd personally never use a device that lets out a sound, since my cane does a good enough job to justify that embarassment.

Put another way, canes have a cultural head start. People know what canes are and how the blind use them, so its culturally integrated to society. We don't have to explain ourselves. New technology will never be adopted if it adds an additional cost of having to explain ourselves. If glasses look too weird, we won't use them because every other person will come up asking "woah thats cool. what are they?" We will never use sound-based systems because people will come up to ask us what it is. Tech that replaces/augments canes are great, but you need to contextualize them into a social setting. Blind people want to belong, so we want both tech fixes to our sight and cultural fixes to discrimination and invisible labor.

Please start here:

$1


Many, many sighted engineers and tech hobbyists have worked on similar projects, typically without knowing much about blindness or speaking first (in person) to blind folks. This invariably leads to disappointment for developers and prospective users/customers.

It's good to spend a week or two tinkering and trying a few things before you do research, if only to make the enormity of the engineering problems clear. But then have everyone on the team read about solutions that already exist, techniques known not to work, etc. This will save you lots of time.

If you're proposing to implement passive stereo for 3D, realize that this will not be suitable for any safety-critical application. If you don't have the funds to get a decent active stereo (that is, stereo + NIR projected pattern), time of flight, or other off-the-shelf 3D sensor, then you can certainly go with home brew stereo using OpenCV or the like. Most stereo solutions are unpleasantly burdensome on processors and memory, though.

Whatever sensor you can pull off, be sure to read up on the sensing technique's limitations. All sensors have limitations that are serious liabilities for generalized object/hazard detection. This is one of many reasons why it's wise to severely restrict the types of objects you're proposing to detect. Incidentally, there is an entire class of objects for which ALL sensors have problems.

Before you do ANY engineering, make local contacts in the blind and visually impaired community. Try to solve a single, very well defined problem for your contacts. Trying to "detect any object that could potentially be hazardous" isn't well defined as an engineering problem. There's a saying among some older engineers in image processing field: trying to find anything anywhere is impossible; trying to find something somewhere may be feasible.

I wouldn't suggest object/hazard detection as the problem for your team to solve unless you decide to develop a proof of concept to detect a specific type of hazards. Also realize that hazard detection will only be a pressing concern for some folks in the BVI community--knowing which folks those may be will also help determine how your interface should work.

Detecting hazards is very difficult. Unless you already have experience segmenting objects from the background, you'll likely get very frustrated. Don't try to detect any but large hazards if they're on the ground.

Consider all the ways the tech will fail. It will fail, and planning for the various failure modes is critical in this or any other engineering project. Write up a spec document defining performance for your project. Difficulty in defining performance in quantitative terms is an indication that you'll run into trouble with development, testing, and improvement.

Finally, I wouldn't suggest trying to both develop a pair of glasses AND develop an object/hazard-detecting application AND have this be your first effort in assistive tech. Any one of these is difficult.

Good luck! As long as y'all are willing to put work into research, documenting your specs, etc., I'd be happy to answer questions that may come up. I've worked a few decades in image processing, have patents in 3D sensing, etc.

Hi. So. Do you know all the information about how canes and how seeing eye dogs work? It may be beneficial for you to find out and perhaps even visit your local commission for the blind to see if they would do some cane training with you. Canes don’t just sense objects. They also help with things like changing terrain and depth. So if you took away a cane you could start having issues where you trip more or step off things with little lips that you otherwise wouldn’t notice. Cracks, debris, sidewalk with root coming up underneath, sidewalk that ends.

You need to do a bit more research in regards to that type of travel in general and perhaps work on experience it yourself because there is a lot of things those canes help you to find that those glasses may miss

How much background research have you done in this field??

A quick cursory search brought up these two commercial products:

* $1 : a cane with ultrasound sensor for low-hanging obstacles -- seems like it could be improved
* $1 : a wearable lidar sensor that provides both haptic and audible feedback

I also found a bunch of poorly concieved/executed research papers and prototypes.

I recommend looking at these to get a better idea of the problem domain and current solution space... Also read /u/Rethunker post in this thread at-least twice -- they're giving you excellent advice!

https://www.reddit.com/r/Blind/comments/pw0e5p/do_you_have_survey_or_questionnaire_to_post/

There’s a saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Canes generally do a great job of alerting us to obstacles, in addition to being cheap and sturdy.

In fairness, this kind of device could be situationally useful to detect hanging objects at eye-level (maybe a tree branch), but overall it sounds like you’re trying to solve a problem that blind people pretty much figured out centuries ago.

I personally prefer my cane but something like that would be nice if it shook, not noise, as I work in a very noisy environment! I also would definitely have to think about price. In general, most disabled people if on SSDI only earn about 800-1200 a month. Nearly all of that tends to go to rent and food. I’d say I have about $100 leftover every paycheck and if this needed special batteries every week / month then the cost could add up quickly. Another thing is that this would a device that would definitely never replace ye old cane, just cause it wouldn’t tell others that I’m blind.

Also the insurance claims would be absolute hell if I wore only those and got hit by someone in a car. They wouldn’t know I’m blind and my claim would be rejected. (See: cases when canes aren’t red & white or have stickers on them.)

I spent last week navigating my way through four different airports. I walked into an empty wheelchair in an extendable ramp and slapped a passenger in the head while reaching for my airplane seat. There were many more near misses that I know about and probably even more that I didn't notice.

Help would have been appreciated.

As u/hippocowboy22 pointed out a phone already serves the purpose pretty well for many low vision people. Looking at a phone while walking doesn't attract unnecessary attention since everybody's doing it anyway.

What I'd like to see is a a belt with vibrating points that indicate the direction of nearby objects with their location and their nearness with the intensity of the vibration. If the left side of my belt starts vibrating then I know there's an object on my left side, and if the vibration gets stronger I know it's getting closer. A belt is low enough to the ground to detect the objects I'm unlikely to see with my limited visual radius, and since a belt is pretty near my hands' natural position turning the device on or off would be unnoticeable in a crowd. I'm not sure if cameras are the best way to go- maybe some type of radar/sonar/echolocation unit in the belt buckle and at the sides of the belt would work better in low light environments. Multiple sensing units would allow more precise triangulation.

Now that you've got me thinking about it, an entire shirt or jacket that worked like that would be game changing. Remember me when your first royalty check gets cut.

You're welcome to DM me if you want to discuss some ideas. I realize high school budgets are limited and the ideas I've floated require more capital than is generally available from the public school system but we'll work with what you have. Good luck, and thank you for wanting to help.

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