Virtual Reality Without Vision: A Haptic and Auditory White Cane to Navigate Complex Virtual Worlds

Siu, Alexa F.; Sinclair, Mike; Kovács, Róbert; Ofek, Eyal; Holz, Christian; Cutrell, Edward

doi:10.1145/3313831.3376353

Cited by 70 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…Furthermore, an exoskeleton-type [19], [20] or a white cane-type [21], [22] haptic interface can be used to display the reaction force when a virtual obstacle is touched. These systems have significantly enhanced mobility training through virtual environments.…”

Section: A Haptic Feedback Systems For the Visually Impairedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Training System for White Cane Technique Using Illusory Pulling Cues Induced by Asymmetric Vibrations

Tanabe

Nunokawa

Doi

et al. 2022

IEEE Trans. Neural Syst. Rehabil. Eng.

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A white cane is conventionally used by visually impaired persons to assist their mobility. To learn its proper operation, training by an orientation & mobility specialist is necessary. However, because the number of specialists is limited, visually impaired persons often do not receive sufficient training. To rectify this issue, a training environment in which the visually impaired can train independently is required. This paper proposes a training system that enables the visually impaired to learn white cane techniques using illusory pulling cues. Specifically, in the white cane touch technique, which is a basic white cane technique, a system that targets the swing width of the white cane is presented by illusory pulling cues. To verify the efficacy of the system, a prototype was implemented and evaluated via user tests. The results confirmed that the error of the swing width of the white cane decreased following use of the proposed system. The proposed system will contribute to the development of the mobility of the visually impaired by enabling them to train with the white cane independently and spontaneously, thereby reducing the workload of specialists.

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Section: A Haptic Feedback Systems For the Visually Impairedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Training System for White Cane Technique Using Illusory Pulling Cues Induced by Asymmetric Vibrations

Tanabe

Nunokawa

Doi

et al. 2022

IEEE Trans. Neural Syst. Rehabil. Eng.

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“…Siu et al [15] developed a system, in which visually impaired people navigate by sound and vibration, in order to walk in a complicated virtual environment. They selected five materials for navigating the virtual environment (tile, concrete, metal, wood, and carpet) and had users hit the virtual environment itself or the virtual object with a white cane-shaped controller, through which they received the sound and vibration.…”

Section: Sound Manipulation In Vrmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impact Sound Generation for Audiovisual Interaction with Real-World Movable Objects in Building-Scale Virtual Reality

2021

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In building-scale VR, where the entire interior of a large-scale building is a virtual space that users can walk around in, it is very important to handle movable objects that actually exist in the real world and not in the virtual space. We propose a mechanism to dynamically detect such objects (that are not embedded in the virtual space) in advance, and then generate a sound when one is hit with a virtual stick. Moreover, in a large indoor virtual environment, there may be multiple users at the same time, and their presence may be perceived by hearing, as well as by sight, e.g., by hearing sounds such as footsteps. We, therefore, use a GAN deep learning generation system to generate the impact sound from any object. First, in order to visually display a real-world object in virtual space, its 3D data is generated using an RGB-D camera and saved, along with its position information. At the same time, we take the image of the object and break it down into parts, estimate its material, generate the sound, and associate the sound with that part. When a VR user hits the object virtually (e.g., hits it with a virtual stick), a sound is generated. We demonstrate that users can judge the material from the sound, thus confirming the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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“…For example, SeeingVR introduces methods for making VR accessible to low-vision users, and largely takes inspiration from prior systems for providing access to the digital and physical worlds, e.g., through adjustments to visual content and through various automated methods for describing or enhancing the virtual content at runtime [18,72,76]. Other work looks to leverage the advantages of technologies, like the white cane, with which some people with disabilities are already familiar in order navigate virtual content [58,64,71]. Prior work has also considered how to make other 3D applications, such as games [3,19] or CAD software [56,57], accessible through similar techniques.…”

Section: Making Applications Accessiblementioning

confidence: 99%

Making Mobile Augmented Reality Applications Accessible

Herskovitz

White

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the 22nd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

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Augmented Reality (AR) technology creates new immersive experiences in entertainment, games, education, retail, and social media. AR content is often primarily visual and it is challenging to enable access to it non-visually due to the mix of virtual and real-world content. In this paper, we identify common constituent tasks in AR by analyzing existing mobile AR applications for iOS, and characterize the design space of tasks that require accessible alternatives. For each of the major task categories, we create prototype accessible alternatives that we evaluate in a study with 10 blind participants to explore their perceptions of accessible AR. Our study demonstrates that these prototypes make AR possible to use for blind users and reveals a number of insights to move forward. We believe our work sets forth not only exemplars for developers to create accessible AR applications, but also a roadmap for future research to make AR comprehensively accessible. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Human computer interaction (HCI); Accessibility technologies; Mixed / augmented reality.

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Virtual Reality Without Vision: A Haptic and Auditory White Cane to Navigate Complex Virtual Worlds

Cited by 70 publications

References 35 publications

Training System for White Cane Technique Using Illusory Pulling Cues Induced by Asymmetric Vibrations

Training System for White Cane Technique Using Illusory Pulling Cues Induced by Asymmetric Vibrations

Impact Sound Generation for Audiovisual Interaction with Real-World Movable Objects in Building-Scale Virtual Reality

Making Mobile Augmented Reality Applications Accessible

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