Video Sonification to Support Visually Impaired People: The VISaVIS Approach

In this paper we present a preliminary study about an assistive technology to support blind and visually impaired people (BVIP) in perceiving and navigating indoor environments. In the VISaVIS project we aim at designing the proof-of-concept of a new wearable device to help BVIPs in recognizing the form of the surrounding environment, thus facilitating their movements. In particular, the device is intended to create, at run-time, a sound representation of the environment captured by a head mounted RGBD camera. The underpinning idea is that, through the sonification of the video images captured by the camera, the user will progressively learn to associate the perceived sound to information like the distance, the dimension, and the format of the obstacles he/she is framing. We qualitatively validated our proposal in two challenging and general scenarios, and we grant access to demo videos to prove the effectiveness of our sonification strategy.