Illustration showing a blind person navigating in a city filled with location markers emitting sounds

SAM-Guide

Spatial Awareness for Multimodal Guidance

SAM-Guide’s high level objective is to efficiently assist Visually Impaired People (VIP) in tasks that require interactions with space. It aims to develop a multimodal interface to assist VIP during different types of spatial interactions, including object reaching, large-scale navigation (indoor and outdoor), and outdoor sport activities.

SAM-Guide aims to study and model how to optimally supplement vision with both auditory and tactile feedback, reframing spatial interactions as target-reaching affordances, and symbolizing spatial properties by 3D ego-centered beacons. Candidate encoding schemes will be evaluated through Augmented Reality (AR) serious games relying on motion capture platforms and indoor localisation solutions to track the user’s movements.

SAM-Guide is a inter-disciplinary collaboration project between three sites: (1) the LPNC and GIPSA laboratories from the Grenoble-Alpes University, (2) the CMAP from Ecole Polytechnique in Paris-Saclay, and the LITIS and CERREV from Normandy University.