I hope the technology can reopen a window for them.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “Love Fan” (ID: ifanr), author: Lee extraordinary. 
It is difficult for us to understand how difficult it is for a blind or visually impaired person to go shopping by subway.
And some places where accessibility is not perfect will even bring life-threatening danger to the visually impaired. Some time ago, the founder of the Beijing Paralympic House, Wenjun, was occupied by a private car because of the barrier-free intersection. It was a great irony to fall into the pit of the parking lot while searching for another road.
Image from: Beijing News
Fortunately, technology is changing this reality a little bit.
German designer jakob kilian designed a wearable sensory alternative for the visually impaired. Unfolding space, this glove-shaped device can be the eyes of the visually impaired, allowing them to “see the world by hand”.
The built-in depth camera of this device can generate 3D images of the wearer’s surroundings, calculate the position and distance of the surrounding obstacles and the wearer, and feedback to the back of the user’s hand in a tactile manner through the vibration motor on the glove.
A plurality of vibration motors are distributed on the glove. In practical applications, each vibration motor represents a different direction, and the intensity of the vibration represents the distance between the wearer and the obstacle.
This device replaces vision with touch, so the accuracy of the touch is very high. This is a bit like the force feedback glove that Fan Faner introduced before, which can realistically simulate the touch of different scenes, such as simulating water droplets on the finger, playing the piano, buttons and other fine touch.
jakob kilian hopes that this device can replace the traditional guide cane, allowing visually impaired people to explore the environment interactively with this depth perception, so as to avoid obstacles and navigate autonomously in unfamiliar environments.
At the same time, the cost of this device is less than 500 Euro (about 3899 RMB), which is cheaper than most sensory alternatives, which means it is expected to be used by more visually impaired people.
The visually impaired rely on a cane outdoors, picture from: Toronto Star
The navigation technology for the blind and the visually impaired has always been a big difficulty. Although GPS and other navigation technologies are very common, the error of more than ten meters is enough to cause serious accidents. This kind of risk makes manufacturers dare not try it easily.
Image courtesy of:
As the netizen @马之人 said, navigation for the blind is even harder than automatic driving, because the environment in which people live in everyday life is much more complicated than the fixed road, and the GPS is The room is simply not available.
Some blind navigation solutions are similar to autonomous driving, such as last year and the self-driving Caltech developed a hybrid real-world application based on the Microsoft HoloLens head-end, through depth-based recognition. SLAM (Real Time Location and Map Construction) technology to sense spatial location, plus built-in voice prompts to help visually impaired people complete indoor navigation.
Microsoft HoloLens, Image from: Microsoft
This technology is also designed to help visually impaired people achieve “accessibility” in unfamiliar buildings, but the drawback is that a comprehensive scan of the scenes and routes is required in advance to achieve a higher navigation accuracy. Others suddenly appear in the planning route, and the system may not be able to respond.
Space modeling is required in advance, image from: VRScout
So this technology can’t be applied to real life for a while, even if the technology is mature enough, the price of HoloLens will make many visually impaired people discouraged. If the number of users is too small, it will also make the manufacturers lack the power of R&D and continuous updating. .
According to the World Health Organization, more than 200 million people worldwide have moderate to severe visual impairment, and the number of blind people is 36 million. The British Lancet Global Health expects the number of blind people worldwide to increase by 2050. To 115 million.
Image from: Unsplash
Although this is not a very large market, this group has a strong need for technology products that improve the quality of life. God took their light and hoped that technology could open a window for them again.