NAV-VIR: an audio-tactile virtual environment to assist visually impaired people

Marc-Aurèle Rivière (1, 2) , Simon Gay (1, 2) , Katerine Romeo (1, 2) , Edwige Pissaloux (1, 2) , Michal Bujacz , Piotr Skulimowski , Pawel Strumillo

1 LITIS - Laboratoire d'Informatique, de Traitement de l'Information et des Systèmes
2 STI - LITIS - Equipe Systèmes de Transport Intelligent

This paper introduces the NAV-VIR system, a multimodal virtual environment to assist visually impaired people in virtually discovering and exploring unknown areas from the safety of their home. The originality of NAV-VIR resides in (1) an optimized representation of the surrounding topography, the spatial gist, based on human spatial cognition models and the sensorimotor supplementation framework, and (2) a multimodal orientation-aware immersive virtual environment relying on two synergetic interfaces: an interactive force feedback tablet, the F2T, and an immersive HRTF-based 3D audio simulation relying on binaural recordings of real environments. This paper presents NAV-VIR functionalities and its preliminary evaluation through a simple shape and movement perception task.

Domaines: Interface homme-machine [cs.HC]; Electronique; Psychologie

Marc-Aurèle Rivière, Simon Gay, Katerine Romeo, Edwige Pissaloux, Michal Bujacz, et al.. NAV-VIR: an audio-tactile virtual environment to assist visually impaired people. 9th International IEEE EMBS Conference on Neural Engineering, Mar 2019, San-Francisco, United States. ⟨hal-02353327⟩