People with peripheral vision loss/Tunnel Vision are facing challenges in their daily lives. We propose a robotic  assistant for them to locate the objects and navigate to find objects in the environments based on object detection techniques and multimodal feedback. 

• What is Tunnel Vision? Why we care about it?

Tunnel vision is the loss of peripheral vision with retention of central vision, resulting in a constricted circular tunnel like field of vision. By age 65, one in three Americans have some form of vision impairing eye condition and may notice their side or peripheral vision gradually failing. Unfortunately, this loss of peripheral vision can greatly affect a person’s ability to live independently. The challenges of people with tunnel vision could be divided into two categories: 1) See, feel, hear the invisible outside their field of vision, e.g., finding objects in the environment; 2) get an enhanced perception inside their field of vision, e.g., reading books and accessing computing devices.

• How does AuxiScope help? What is the role of Google Coral inside it?

AuxiScope explores the surroundings of the user by rotating its head and supports voice interactions to provide the information. At the same time, it uses arms to knock on the user’s shoulder to convey the left/right direction of the target; uses hands to generate vibrations to convey the distance of the target from the central vision. With computing capability, Google Coral serves as the brain of AuxiScope, running machine learning algorithms to detect the faces and objects then instructing its other body parts to knock, speak and vibrate to help the users to see, feel, hear the invisible outside their field of central vision.

• Future Work for more elegant and practical solutions?

Although we provides cardboard glasses to stimulate the tunnel vision, we are aware of that sighted people could not exactly feel as the people with visual impairments feel. We built this prototype based on the provided materials. To move on, we need to actively engage our target users in the process of design, comparing different solutions including AR headsets, handheld or wearable devices. With this project, we hope to arise the awareness of tunnel vision, which could be a kind of situational impairment that everyone, including you and me, may also experience in one period of the life, e.g., when getting old.

with team members (Hsuan-Wei Fan, Yuki Tang, Jiahao Li) at UIST 2019 Student Innovation Competition

AUXISCOPE: Related Projects

• PneuFetch: Supporting Blind and Visually Impaired People to Fetch Nearby Object via Light Haptic Cues (CHI 2020 Late Breaking Works)