Section: New Results

Augmented Reality Maps for Visually Impaired People

Participants: Anke Brock

VISTE builds on the previous development of the GEOTHNK platform (Kavouras et al., 2016). The VISTE framework and associated resources and tools focus on collaborative learning of spatial concepts and skills for sighted and VI students to foster inclusion within mainstream education. VISTE will empower students with VI to acquire spatial skills through specially designed learning activities as well as through an augmented reality prototype. At Inria Bordeaux, we have designed and implemented an augmented reality prototype that can be used as spatial thinking training tool in special education schools. It makes use of the PapARt technology, an OpenSource augmented reality framework (Laviole & Hachet, 2012). Current low-tech Orientation & Mobility (O&M) tools for visually impaired people, e.g. tactile maps, possess limitations. Interactive accessible maps have been developed to overcome these (Ducasse et al., 2018). However, most of them are limited to exploration of existing maps, and have remained in laboratories. Using a participatory design approach, we have worked closely with 15 visually impaired students and 3 O&M instructors over 6 months. We iteratively designed and developed an augmented reality map destined at use in O&M classes in special education centers. This prototype combines projection, audio output and use of tactile tokens, and thus allows both map exploration and construction by low vision and blind people. Our user study demonstrated that all students were able to successfullƒy use the prototype, and showed a high user satisfaction. A second phase with 22 international special education teachers allowed us to gain more qualitative insights. This work shows that augmented reality has potential for improving the access to education for visually impaired people. A publication about this map prototype and the user study has been (conditionally) accepted at CHI’18 (Jeremy Albouys-Perrois, Jeremy Laviole, Carine Briant, and Anke Brock. Towards a Multisensory Augmented Reality Map for Blind and Low Vision People: a Participatory Design Approach. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’18). ACM, New York, USA) Learn more about VISTE project : http://visteproject.eu/ https://team.inria.fr/potioc/viste-empowering-spatial-thinking-of-students-with-visual-impairment/