Blind Navigation


Navigation for the blind

Navigation is a difficult challenge for the blind. Especially in unfamiliar locations, it is difficult to go anywhere when so much of navigation is reliant on visual cues. The goal of the project was to navigate within a building from room to room, completely blindfolded. The two technical problems that we attempted to solve with this project was how to localize yourself within a building accurately enough to navigate, and how to relay the navigation instructions to someone without visual cues. The solution we ended up coming up with was to use ARKit for localization and collision detection. The navigation instructions are then relayed to wrist bands that vibrate variable amounts depending on if you’re facing the right direction to the next checkpoint.