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Towards an Immersive Auditory-based Journey Planner for the Visually Impaired

Published: 10 January 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Large cities typically host many important services, businesses and activities accessed by the vision-impaired community. Supporting safe and independent orientation and mobility is thus a key priority for city municipalities. We outline the conceptual design of an immersive auditory based simulator to assist journey planning and enhance route familiarity for pedestrians with low vision or blindness. As proofs of concept, we present both a web and smartphone auditory-based virtual reality simulator, in which narrative speech describing specific locations, in combination with immersive and spatially located auditory cues recorded from those locations, is delivered to the user. We discuss technical challenges, and how this tool aims to address journey preparation, route familiarisation, and cognitive load challenges for city users with vision impairment.

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  1. Towards an Immersive Auditory-based Journey Planner for the Visually Impaired

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      cover image ACM Other conferences
      OzCHI '19: Proceedings of the 31st Australian Conference on Human-Computer-Interaction
      December 2019
      631 pages
      ISBN:9781450376969
      DOI:10.1145/3369457
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      • HFESA: Human Factors and Ergonomics Society of Australia Inc.

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      New York, NY, United States

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      Published: 10 January 2020

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      Author Tags

      1. Ambisonics
      2. accessibility
      3. assistive technologies
      4. route familiarisation
      5. virtual reality
      6. vision-impairment

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      OZCHI'19
      OZCHI'19: 31ST AUSTRALIAN CONFERENCE ON HUMAN-COMPUTER-INTERACTION
      December 2 - 5, 2019
      WA, Fremantle, Australia

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