Inspired by the classic Greek myth of the Labyrinth, students at Italy’s University of Palermo led by Pierluigi Gallo have come up with a mobile app that offers navigational help for the visual impaired, effectively turning smartphones into visual canes.
The Labyrinth myth is the beginning of Theseus’s story, when he starts his quest to slay the infamous Minotaur before realizing that he will get hopelessly lost if he starts to wander around the maze where it resides. To help, the princess Ariadne gives him a ball of yarn to mark his path, which is the inspiration both the name of Gallo’s app, Arianna (Italian for Ariadne and short for “pAth Recognition for Indoor Assisted NavigatioN with Augmented perception) as well as how it works.
Gallo’s system was designed with simplicity in mind—all the user needs is a piece of colored tape and the app. The user sticks the tape on the ground before waving their camera back and forth over the floor, which scans the ground for the line. The app analyses those images and picks out the line, vibrating the phone when the line passes under the user’s finger. By scanning the phone back and forth over the line, users can map out a route though the building in the same way they would if they were using a cane.
Diagram of Arianna app
While there are several current apps that offer audible GPS assistance, these systems do not work inside, nor do they filter out ambient noises such as traffic or conversations of passerby. Gallo’s app does not need GPS to function, and doesn’t come with audio distractions. Also, unlike most of the technology developed to aid the visually impaired, Gallo’s app is actually affordable—because the smartphone is actually affordable and much more widespread than other navigational technologies. According to Gallo, the app was tested last month at an Andrea Bocelli Foundation workshop in Boston and performed very well.
While they did not reveal a time frame for the app’s commercial release or its potential cost, the team is reportedly already planning out upgrades, with a potential idea involving infrared lines.
You can find more information about it here.
Source Technology Review
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