ARIANNA stands for pAth Recognition for Indoor Assisted Navigation with Augmented perception. It is a flexible and low cost navigation system for vi- sually impaired people. Arianna permits to navigate colored paths painted or sticked on the floor revealing their directions through vibrational feedback on commercial smartphones.
Several assistance tools exists to overcome visual impairments, most of them exploiting vocal instructions to inform the traveller about his position and the near environment. For example, virtual acoustic displays and verbal commands issued by a synthetic speech display are used in @cite_9 . AudioGPS @cite_4 and Melodious Walkabout @cite_1 use audio cues to provide information on the surrounding environment. Dead-reckoning techniques are employed in Navatar @cite_5 where users interact with the application and help correcting possible navigation errors. In @cite_16 , vibrational feed-back is given by a special glove in the Finger-Braille language. This system requires some dedicated hardware and is specific to the language used. RF-PATH-ID @cite_10 , instead, is based on disseminating passive RFID tags and using a dedicated reader to acquire information on the user location. More examples and detailed information on indoor localization techniques may be found in @cite_12 .
@cite_4 @cite_9 @cite_1 @cite_5 @cite_16 @cite_10 @cite_12
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Indoor navigation systems for users who are visually impaired typically rely upon expensive physical augmentation of the environment or expensive sensing equipment; consequently few systems have been implemented. We present an indoor navigation system called Navatar that allows for localization and navigation by exploiting the physical characteristics of indoor environments, taking advantage of the unique sensing abilities of users with visual impairments, and minimalistic sensing achievable with low cost accelerometers available in smartphones. Particle filters are used to estimate the user's location based on the accelerometer data as well as the user confirming the presence of anticipated tactile landmarks along the provided path. Navatar has a high possibility of large-scale deployment, as it only requires an annotated virtual representation of an indoor environment. A user study with six blind users determines the accuracy of the approach, collects qualitative experiences and identifies areas for improvement. In this paper, we discuss application possibilities of augmented reality technologies in the field of mobility support for the deaf blind. We propose the navigation system called virtual leading blocks for the deaf-blind, which consists of a wearable interface for Finger-Braille, one of the commonly used communication methods among deaf-blind people in Japan, and a ubiquitous environment for barrier-free application, which consists of floor-embedded active radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags. The wearable Finger-Braille interface using two Linux-based wristwatch computers has been developed as a hybrid interface of verbal and nonverbal communication in order to inform users of their direction and position through the tactile sensation. We propose the metaphor of "watermelon splitting" for navigation by this system and verify the feasibility of the proposed system through experiments. The research we are reporting here is part of our effort to develop a navigation system for the blind. Our long-term goal is to create a portable, self-contained system that will allow visually impaired individuals to travel through familiar and unfamiliar environments without the assistance of guides. The system, as it exists now, consists of the following functional components: (1) a module for determining the traveler's position and orientation in space, (2) a Geographic Information System comprising a detailed database of our test site and software for route planning and for obtaining information from the database, and (3) the user interface. The experiment reported here is concerned with one function of the navigation system: guiding the traveler along a predefined route. We evaluate guidance performance as a function of four different display modes: one involving spatialized sound from a virtual acoustic display, and three involving verbal commands issued by a synthetic speech display. The virtual display mode fared best in terms of both guidance performance and user preferences. In this paper the design, development and evaluation of a GPS-based auditory navigation system is presented that implicitly guides a user by a contextualized rendering of personal audio files. The benefit of this navigation system is that the user can listen to his own audio contents while being navigated. Wearing headphones, the user listens to audio contents which are located in a virtual environment. The user simply walks in the direction where the sound seems to have its origin. A formal evaluation under field conditions proved that navigation with contextualized audio contents is efficient and intuitive and that users are highly satisfied with the navigation support given by the evaluated auditory display.