Mixed reality has an enormous amount of applications in our daily lives, and Microsoft Hololens are perfect tools to prove it.
With its ability to quickly detect the environment, it can be used as a prosthesis for the visually impaired, guiding users with audio instructions as they move.
This has been shown by researchers at Caltech and the University of Southern California, where they have been able to create a prototype that creates a map with walls, obstacles and doors of the environment surrounding a Hololens user. As the person walked, the glasses warned of what was around them, either with a voice or a warning sound. A kind of hissing hiss sounded when the person approached a chair, for example, sound that was reproduced in the exact direction of the obstacle in question.
CT says the team recruited seven blind people to prove it. They were given a brief introduction but were not trained, and then asked to perform a number of tasks. Users could reliably locate and point to objects from audio signals, and could find a chair in a room in a fraction of the time they would normally do so.
In the tests, they were also able to navigate from the entrance of a building to a room on the second floor following the instructions of the handset. A “virtual guide” repeatedly told them to “follow me” from an apparent distance of a few feet ahead, while also warning when the stairs approach, where the handrails are and when the user has gone off course.
At the moment it is only a prototype, it is necessary that systems like HoloLens become lighter and more power to be really useful in this sector, but we can already imagine what we may have in a few years time in the market.