Real World VR Proxies to Support Blind People in Mobility Training

Abstract

Mobility training is an essential part of blind people’s education in order to move in public spaces. In order to safely learn new routes in public space, however, a seeing trainer must assist the blind person. With the increasing availability of VR hardware, it is possible to transfer real spatial environments to virtual representations. The digitized environments can be used as a basis for this training without safety problems by real world hazards. This allows to cope with the limited resources of sighted assistants and enables blind people to become more independent. We propose to capture real public spaces (such as sidewalks, train stations etc.) and make them in this way ascertainable. Orientation and mobility can be trained in this digital model via multimodal sensory feedback while involving intuitive locomotion and white cane exploration. This paper sketches the related work and proposes our novel approach. Furthermore, we suggest additional improvements on our ongoing research.