VES: A Mixed-Reality System to Assist Multisensory Spatial Perception and Cognition for Blind and Visually Impaired People

Abstract

In this paper, the Virtually Enhanced Senses (VES) System is described. It is an ARCore-based, mixed-reality system meant to assist blind and visually impaired people’s navigation. VES operates in indoor and outdoor environments without any previous in-situ installation. It provides users with specific, runtime-configurable stimuli according to their pose, i.e., position and orientation, and the information of the environment recorded in a virtual replica. It implements three output data modalities: Wall-tracking assistance, acoustic compass, and a novel sensory substitution algorithm, Geometry-based Virtual Acoustic Space (GbVAS). The multimodal output of this algorithm takes advantage of natural human perception encoding of spatial data. Preliminary experiments of GbVAS have been conducted with sixteen subjects in three different scenarios, demonstrating basic orientation and mobility skills after six minutes training.