A new headset designed by Microsoft in collaboration with Guide Dogs charity talks to the visually impaired and helps around cities. The idea for the headset came from a Microsoft employee.
The technology needs the headset and a Windows phone and relies on location and navigation data alongside bunch of other information it receives from information beacons spread across urban locations to describe routes.
According to Guide Dogs, there are as many as two million registered visually impaired people in the UK and out of these nearly 180,000 rarely or never go out. This is because of the multitude of challenges they face every day preventing them from getting to places and doing things they like.
The charity adds that getting through a new city is particularly “daunting, even for people with enough confidence to tackle the challenge independently”.
The headset still requires testing, but out of the eight people with sight loss who have already tested it five has said that they feel a lot safer and more confident wearing it.
There are already similar headsets available and this one is an adaption of one of those. The sound in the headset is conducted through the jawbone and it provides wearers with a series of verbal and non-verbal descriptions. It can also provide set of navigation instructions including when to turn and what lies ahead.
