ADVANCE FOR USE SUNDAY, DEC. 4, 2016 AND THEREAFTER - In this Sept. 15, 2016 photo, Illinois State University senior Ahmad Mshaiel, makes his way through a set of obstacles placed to test an augmented reality app in Normal, Ill. Mshaiel was one of several sight-impaired volunteers testing the app at the ISU's Alumni Center designed by Float Learning based in Morton, Ill., that detects obstacles and alerts the user using audio and haptic signals. (David Zalaznik/Journal Star via AP)
Morton, Illinois based startup Float’s Cydalion app attempts to alert the visually-impaired to upcoming obstacles using augmented reality.
MORTON, Ill. (AP) - While a wildly popular smartphone game goaded hordes this summer to search the world for virtual characters on a screen, a group of local developers worked to bring the real world to visually impaired people through the same types of devices.
Both Pokémon Go, the game that garnered global attention with an estimated half a billion downloads since its release, and Cydalion, an app developed by Morton-based Float that launched Tuesday, operate on the same underlying principle - augmented reality.
Both programs take information gathered by smartphones and tablets, such as location data from sensors and images of the surroundings from cameras, to allow interactivity with the immediate environment.
While Pokémon Go uses near-ubiquitous smartphone technology to entertain, however, Cydalion employs an emerging set of Google-designed hardware and software for a more practical purpose: to detect obstacles in the environment and warn visually impaired people in real time of their approach.
“This is something quite different from other apps in the augmented reality space,” said Chad Udell, managing director of Float. “Many developers are using this new technology to create video games or other entertainment, but we are using it to make a real impact on those who are visually impaired in day-to-day life.”
Cydalion surveys areas in front of an array of sensors and emits a series of tones corresponding to the location and distance of obstacles, with different tones for objects to the right, left or center, high-pitch sounds for head-height barriers, and low-pitch emissions for tripping hazards. The tones vary in frequency according to the distance of the objects from the device.
Equipment (Recommended):
Project tango device.
Lanyard or Vest.
Bone-conduction Headphones.
Cydalion. Navigation App for the Blind and Visually Impaired
Link to the App (Play Store):
https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...float.cydalion
Source:
EXCHANGE: Augmented reality in app for visually impaired - Washington Times
