[mojomark]

I'm not knocking this initiative, I hope it is very successful and helps the blind. However...

About 10 years ago I sat down with the folks at the Maryland School for the Blind (1) to demo a similar mini LIDAR based design with haptic feedback. They thanked me for coming in and promptly brought in a box of similar devices and contraptions and dumped them on the desk. They told me these devices were fine, but really they were happy using canes.

What came next blew my mind. They told me what they really wanted/needed was a way for a blind person to use AutoCAD so that bling people who wanted to work as engineers or architects could do so. Obviously, that's an exponentially tougher challenge, but certainly not not doable.

1. http://www.marylandschoolfortheblind.org

[marco_trujillo]

Thanks for sharing. We have heard this too, in fact many visually impaired I've talked to are skeptical initially. Can't blame them since after many attempts to develop an Electronic Travel Aids (ETA) there was not a good product people love. It is also true that many blind people feel comfortable with their condition, specially if the have good echolocation skills. That doesn't mean they won't appreciate a good product when it arrives, but more like they embraced the problem as part of their lives and aren't looking for a mobility solution (that's usually the case for people who born blind or have been living blind for over 20 years). But that's not the case for the vast majority, people losing sight or people who recently lost it are actively looking solutions. Is matter of digging and finding, there is a lot of variants when it comes to disabilities, definitively a hard puzzle to solve (I've been connecting pieces for over 3 years) but very rewarding.

[mbrookes]

"many visually impaired I've talked to"

This says it all really.

[ndarilek]

As a blind person myself, I think I get from where you're coming here. But, as has been suggested by others, my first read of this was "non-native English speaker" rather than "offensive." I can't count how many times we've been referred to by folks as "blinds," which cracks me up every time (in a good-natured way, that is.) My girlfriend, a wheelchair user and speaker of 4 languages, regularly finds such things amusing as well, particularly as she can usually understand the linguistic reasoning behind much of the awkward phrasing.

That said, I'm glad they seem to be working with blind/visually-impaired folks. I hope they likewise staff their company with blind developers/designers as well, since we're still not terribly well-represented in tech, and it always makes me a little sad to see companies building products for us, but only involving us in the testing/final steps. I'd love to hack on something like this myself, and have played with Arduino-based echolocation augmentation for help with solo cycling/sports/other non-basic use cases. I hope there are blind developers working with you on the firmware.

[marco_trujillo]

Thanks for jumping in. In fact one of the founders is Visually Impaired. Fernando is a tremendous asset to Sunu, he has a Ph.D. in Physics by Harvard, has built two successful companies before Sunu and is one of the smartest, hard-worker and good persons I know.

[marco_trujillo]

Woow, that was a long discussion for a peculiar observation. To be honest I didn't clearly understand what the observation was at the beginning, I did feel it was pointing some sort of incoherence in my reply although I didn't know what it is exactly, and from all your reply's its evident everyone understand something a little different, so... it doesn't really "says it all". Yes, I am from Mexico and we don't have a problem saying "Visually Impaired" (they don't have a problem either), in Mexico we say "Ciego" for blind but people who want to be gentle say "Invidente" which means "no vidente" which can be understand as "not seer" or "no clairvoyant" which is funny and not accurate. In summary, this is not racism, is a medical term for a real condition. It doesn't makes sense to be gentle, embracing the disability is important for adaptation, starting from the term. This is my market, this is the people I love and I want to encourage to be active, the term is just a term, the product and my work spent over the years does says it all.

[filipncs]

In what way does it "say it all"?

Do you feel there's a lot someone could learn about you that isn't immediately clear from your comment above? Or does it "say it all" about you?

[mbrookes]

Apparently insensitive language is ok, but questioning it is not? HN, you've lost your way.

[ajeet_dhaliwal]

Why is this insensitive language? What do you think he should have said instead? I'm curious because I would not want to offend anyone. 'Visually impaired' seems like a standard way to describe people who have either full or some degree of partial blindness, in the UK you can even register as 'visually impaired' with the government and the NHS (National Health Service) uses this term.

http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/Visual-impairment/Pages/Introdu...

[JackC]

It comes across pretty badly in my dialect of American English to turn adjectives about people into nouns. For example, "I saw a disabled on the bus today" or "a visually impaired" or "a Chinese" without "person" afterward would all be really weird phrasing, and if you were otherwise fluent in my dialect it would imply that whatever you were about to say next was likely to be pretty clueless about that group.

BUT I wouldn't apply that inference to someone with a foreign accent, even a British accent. It's a fine point of style that I can't assume will translate across dialects. (For example, "I saw a German on the bus today" would be much less weird than "a Chinese" to anyone speaking my dialect. How do we know? We just know.) So here I think mbrookes has the wrong idea.

[srean]

All I can say is thanks for taking the time to write this. For the life of me I could not figure out what did the op do wrong.

[GordonS]

I guess their complaint is that the phrase "visually impaired", rather than "people with a visual impairment", or even the less respectful "visually impaired people", sort of makes it sound like the people he spoke with are defined by their disability.

[prawn]

I think the founder is originally from Mexico so it's possible that English is not their first language. And either way, there's a more polite way to bring something to their attention than as you did. It's possible to have your heart in the right place, but misstep with language.

[mmjaa]

What should it be? I found this a much nicer way of describing 'blind' people than you, apparently, did. What is a better, more polite way to describe someone whose vision is impaired?

[rurounijones]

I am a native English speaker (UK) and I cannot figure out what the problem was. Instead of assuming why not explain?

I am GUESSING that some people think "visually impaired" is insensitive?

[throwanem]

You're not questioning; you're attacking. Why?

[bluGill]

I looked into this years ago in college. What I discovered is there are two different problems the blind face: obstacle avoidance and navigation. Most people focus on the first, but in fact a cane works just fine, and the can also plays the useful purpose of telling everyone that I need you to pay extra attention to me because I won't avoid you (there are a lot of negatives to advertising that you are blind)

Where the blind have problems is larger scale navigation in unfamiliar places. An example is a few years ago a blind person stopped me to ask how to get to a building - we were standing right in front of it so this should be easy, but it wasn't. What I would do is jump over the flowers, duck under a railing and I'd be on the ramp. It is a good thing he knew to be suspicious when I gave him those directions or he would have got hurt. I eventually got him there, but it was a lot harder than I expected, and this is for a case where he only had a few meters to go. Imagine trying to get around a new city - most people rely on sight far too much.

[marco_trujillo]

You are completely right, thanks for pointing it out. The problem is the mobility and the orientation. The first one can be trained and the second needs external support. Orientation is being solved with Apps like Google maps and other navigation apps for outdoor and indoor spaces (blindsquare, overthere, overhere, seeing eye gps, near explorer...). Mobility though, is a hard one because of the training involved (not everyone develops the same skill) and although canes work pretty well, they are limited too. Canes won't catch upper body obstacles, won't anticipate any obstacle until you hit it when it is close enough. Sunu band doesn't intent to replace a cane, but to enhance the navigation experience for the user with a complimentary aid that provides an extra layer of information that reduces anxiety, augments spatial perception and foster the development of the users mobility skills. Thank you.

[amorphid]

>> They told me what they really wanted/needed was a way for a blind person to use AutoCAD

That's a fascinating idea. I wonder how that'd work. Is there an existing interface, that allows a blind person to experience a 3-D object and it's interior? For example, how would a blind person understand a blueprint for the Leaning Tower of Pisa, exterior walkways, interior staircases, etc.

[mojomark]

So after tgat meeting at the MSFTB, I delved into the possibilities for a CAD system for the blind. An engineer myself, I'm very familar with standard CAD.

Yes, you can have a haptic feedback probe (e.g. a wand) that can be used to trace the surfaces and edges of a virtual object, but imagine trying to understand say, a sky scraper model with a single probe. Or a nest of pipes, valves and cables. And what about understanding precise scale, turning layers on/off, or slicing a model to understand interior arrangments? The challenge is overwhelming.

However, at the time I thought "OK, first things first - how do you sense basic objects like blocks and spheres without sight." It seemed to me that you'd want to exploit as many body sensory inputs as possible to get the job done. Also at that time haptic feedback glove research was growing - mostly for remote 'robotic arm' controls.

Now, I see there has been a lot of progress in this area: http://dev-blog.mimugloves.com/data-gloves-overview/

It would be great if a human could reach into a model and explore surface contours with both hands (all fingers). I think the ideal 'gloves' would not only impart resistance on fingers and wrist, but also the elbow, shoulder and perhaps torso to give the most accurate sense of realism of a model. In addition to resistance, it would be ideal for the glove to simulate texture using vibrational haptic feedback for even more realism. After that, the UI would really need to be fine-tuned to enable scaling, slicing, layering, measuring, and constructing in a virtual space using tactile/audio feedback vice visual feedback. What this UI is exactly, I dont know.

[saulrh]

The model for the interaction has already been figured out by all of these tools that people are trying to create, hasn't it? Point a probe into the world and get back a signal that corresponds to some geometric property of the world - distance from the probe, edge-detection, etc. It's like virtual reality: replace the world with a rendered scene and the lidar range detecter with something like a Vive wand.

[cuauhtli]

yes, the trick right here is to have something that is of everyday use, we actually embedded an IMU and have the ability to recognize the space and map it with very low power consumption in the wrist. gathering the info from the environment without the use of a camera that uses a lot of processing power and mAh. What we developed is a fashionable navigation watch for the blind and visually impaired.

[xkcd-sucks]

Possibly modeling the acoustic characteristics of a space + simulating its response to pings/white noise bursts/etc.?

[vinceguidry]

Sad, but we'll probably fix blindness before we'll ever fix our software to be able to accommodate it.