ARGUS A ssisting Pe r sonal Gu idance S ystem for People with Visual Impairment

1. ARGUS Assisting Personal Guidance System for People with Visual Impairment Presented by Manfred Schrenk Managing Director of the Central European Institute of Technology www.ceit.at m.schrenk@ceit.at

2. THE CONSORTIUM

3. THE MOTIVATION

4. THE TECHNOLOGY

5. THE GOAL To develop a GNSS-based mobility service for people with impaired visually capabilities, to guide them along a pre acoustic and audio-haptic signals, which meets the level of accuracy and reliability they need in urban environment for improving their day life autonomy Other outcomes: • Develop innovative tools which could help blind and visually impaired people to move around autonomously • Implemenation of a user-friendly portable satellite with acoustic and haptic user interfaces enabling users to obtain a insight of their surrounding environment • Retrieve benefits from navigation services to accuracy and reliability as well as the level of service availability.

6. THE ARGUS GUIDING CONCEPT

7. BINAURAL SOUNDS What are binaural sounds? Binaural technologies reproduce the (arrival time and amplitude between the ears). Binaural sounds create the illusion that sounds by a stereo headphone emanate from specific directions and distances in the surrounding space.

8. SYSTEM OPERATION

9. ARGUS OUTCOMES An intelligent guiding portable device to support people with visual disabilities as well as other collectives such as people working in low visibility and hazardous situations or the ageing population. To build up a pre-commercial navigation product secure, pre-defined track. The positioning component will use satellite based positioning. Development of innovative tactile signals, acoustic and audio providing a non-visual track perception and mental map of the path. Provide updated data through a public Service Platform on the web. collected by Argus users will be shared with other ARGUS users or with general public. Develop a Personal User Software application this software, stored pre-defined tracks can be transmitted to the user terminal on demand.

10. THE BENEFITS IN PLANNING The ARGUS project provides interesting insights to planning as for: the end user involvement the cartographic and semantic aspects the definition of Points of Interest the accessibility of the spaces in the city. Argus is important also for Municipalities to improve their accessible routes.

11. Thank you! Manfred Schrenk Managing Director of CEIT Alanova Central European Institute of Technology m.schrenk@ceit.at

12. Assisting Personal Guidance System for People with Visual Impairment Manfred schrenk CEIT Alanova, Schwechat, Austria Hypothesis: How 3d sound audio-guides can help improve city’s accessibility Keywords: audio-guide for visually impaired, 3d sounds, accessible cities Summary: Almost 300 million people in the world are visually impaired. About 90% of the world's visually impaired live in developing countries, and about 65 % are aged 50 and older, with an increasing elderly population in many countries, more people will be at risk of age-related visual impairment. The global response to prevention of blindness have had specify results in areas of progress over the last 20 years including prevention, eye care services, development of policies and strategies, campaigns to raise awareness, and stronger international partnerships with engagement of the private sector and civil society. But this global response have also had one of the main areas of progress on the development and implementation of technical assistance to the users. Despite the technology state of the art many questions remain open concerning autonomous navigation, accuracy, integrity. Figure 1: The Argus System Figure 2: ITD and ILD. Inter-aural Time and Level differences ARGUS FP7 Funded project http://projectargus.eu