1. Trinetra (“The Third Eye”) Virtual Sight for the Visually Impaired Priya Narasimhan Carnegie Mellon University priya@cs.cmu.edu http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~priya

2. 2 Narasimhan: Virtual Sight for Visually Impaired Motivation  Conceived this project during last winter  Started to think about a blind person’s experiences needs in the winter  Weather particularly treacherous and hard enough for sighted people  Would be useful to have a way for blind people to “see” through strategic application of technology  For traveling, navigation, day-to-day living, ……  Looking to improve a blind person’s quality of life in a cost-effective way  Make current infrastructure more amenable and accessible to the blind

3. 3 Narasimhan: Virtual Sight for Visually Impaired Design Goals  Understand a blind person’s needs and the “friendliness” of specific technologies for the blind  Not enough to involve a blind person “after the fact”, only in the final stage of project testing  Need to involve a blind person from day one so that the design captures his/her needs  Cost-effectiveness  Technologies for assisting the blind are not commodity and not cheap  If the solution has wider applicability (for business, sighted people, etc.), then, technology transition and adoption can become more feasible  Independence for a blind person  Ensure that a blind person can use/navigate this system without a sighted person’s assistance – this is a significant desire for a blind person

4. 4 Narasimhan: Virtual Sight for Visually Impaired Project Definition  A blind person walking into Entropy needs assistance from the people behind the counter to find items in the store  Blind person hesitant to “bother” a sighted person for assistance  Robs a blind person of his/her independence  Would be valuable for a blind person to be able to walk into Entropy and purchase items without any assistance  Discussed this project with the Entropy management, who is excited to make this work and to see this in action

5. 5 Narasimhan: Virtual Sight for Visually Impaired Initial Target – Entropy

6. 6 Narasimhan: Virtual Sight for Visually Impaired Issues and Challenges  Granularity of identification  Product, shelf, aisle, …….  Exploit existing infrastructure, e.g., barcodes?  How effective if barcodes require line-of-sight scanning?  What if barcodes are constantly changing? Require barcode DB?  Look for vendors with RF tagging of products  Not a pervasive or fully adopted technology, but likely to be  Method of information delivery – cellphone?  User interface issues with information delivery for visual impairments  Need a barcode/RF reader conversation into audio cellphone output  Exploit Entropy’s inventory management  Can make this more cost-effective for Entropy  Exploit vendors’ eagerness to perform advertising at Entropy  Sustainable infrastructure  Minimal baby-sitting and long-lived (if indeed to be beneficial)

7. 7 Narasimhan: Virtual Sight for Visually Impaired Mentors  Priya Narasimhan  Faculty in ECE and CS  Areas of expertise: embedded systems, distributed systems, fault tolerance, middleware  Passionate about ensuring that this project will actually help improve a blind person’s quality of life  Dan Rossi  Oracle system administrator on campus  Intended to be a key driver and user of this technology  Knowledge of which technologies are likely to help/hinder the blind  His participation will ensure that the project will be driven by a blind person’s needs and viewpoint (instead of merely an after-the-fact testing by a blind subject)

8. 8 Narasimhan: Virtual Sight for Visually Impaired Summary  Ultimate goal to exploit technology to assist the visually impaired with “virtual sight”  Scoped course project  Outfit Entropy with the ability for a blind person to navigate and purchase items of interest  Outcome of course project  Working prototype that is demonstrated to be effective (and cheap?)  Dan Rossi (mentor) likely to use this technology if successful  Serve as sustainable example of how technology can improve quality of life for blind people  Building block for follow-on project next semester to outfit the CMU Shuttle Service with similar capabilities to benefit both sighted and blind people