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Headphones are for listening to music and dark glasses are for keeping the sun out of your eyes and leave you looking cool, right? Not any more.
Microsoft has come up with a smart way of helping people who are blind or visually impaired to be better aware of where they are. This is done using 3D audio cues, which reach the person via any pair of earphones. Making it happen is an app called Soundscapes, loaded with 3D recorded navigation information that has been crowdsourced. As a person walks around the city, with phone and earphones handy, guidance comes through on street and location, on stores, places of interest, landmarks etc. The 3D makes these cues directional, so if you’re passing by Cee’s Candy Store on your right, you get the cue in your right ear. The directionality of the guidance makes it all the more natural — intersection coming up in front of you, McDonalds coming up on the left, etc.
Soundscapes offers a way to be more connected to the city and more participative. It isn’t meant to replace a cane or a guide dog that someone may still need, especially for immediate obstacles, but it adds to interacting more with one’s surroundings.
This really smart use of 3D audio is not yet available to all as a huge amount of information needs to be fed in on each city, but is being tried out in some places.
The audio company Bose has recently shown off a concept pair of ‘smart audio’ glasses that will tell you what it is that you’re looking at. It does this through augmented reality. The glasses connect to your phone and use its GPS and sensors that track your movement and direction. They don’t need a camera. With this combination, the glasses are able to tell you, in your ears, which place you’re looking at.
The smart glasses use a form of narrow directional speakers that project sound on to the wearer’s ears. Others can’t hear a thing. All the electronics are packed into the stems of the frame. You tap on either for information.
When they aren’t busy with audio cues, those glasses shoot music into your ears and those who’ve tried them out seem impressed by the sound quality.
For now, Bose is opening up this product for developers to add useful real world applications.
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