Table 1.
Blind participants’ characteristics.
Fig 1.
The apparatus and the two modes offered by the system.
(A) The custom head mount, the bone-conducting headphones (lower left) and the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro smartphone. (B) In detection mode, auditory feedback is given about one point in space. The system indicates the presence of a tangible object in a straight line in front of the user (angle: 0-degree, range: 3 meters). (C) The avoidance mode’s feedback consists in a 3D audio construct of the environment; it detects everything in the fisheye camera’s field of view and renders every tangible surface location in relation to the user (range: 3 meters). Squares represent obstacles, speaker icons illustrate the sound heard by the participant. The more bars there are, the higher the BRR, SF and SI. An X illustrates the absence of sound. (D) A blindfolded participant using the device to reach an obstacle. The device is head-mounted so the camera is at eye-level and facing towards the environment in front of the participant.
Fig 2.
(A) The corridor’s dimensions and examples of obstacle configurations. The obstacles are represented by grey squares. (B) Representation of the corridor with obstacles placed randomly on the horizontal axis and 3 meters apart from each other.
Fig 3.
Obstacle detection and average crossing time.
The average performance of detection (A) and crossing time (B) are for the six trials of the task and they are expressed in percentage of correctly detected and in seconds respectively. SC, sighted control; LB, late blind; EB, early blind.
Fig 4.
Obstacle avoidance and average crossing time.
The average performance of avoidance (A) and crossing time (B) are for the six trials of the task and they are expressed in percentage of correctly detected and in seconds respectively. Significant differences are indicated by asterisks (** = p < 0.01). SC, sighted control; LB, late blind; EB, early blind.