The European Union awarded close to €4 million to Sound of Vision, a project that aims to build an innovative wearable system to assist visually impaired people in navigating and perceiving the environment. The three year project will make use of state of the art technologies to develop a wearable system that creates and conveys real-time auditory and haptic representations of the surrounding environment to the visually impaired.
Researchers, caretakers, and visually impaired cooperate in the development of the Sound of Vision system. 9 partners from 5 European countries bring the necessary complementary competences to design and develop the proposed system, to test the prototype, establish training protocols, in order to provide an intuitive and accessible final product. The technological partners pack all the general and niche expertise required for the creation of Sound of Vision as IT system. The care-taking and medical partners bring in the heavy, essential expertise related to assisting and rehabilitating visually impaired people. Very important, Sound of Vision directly includes the target group in the system development: to provide initial requirements, as co-designers and for extensive experimental testing and refining of the prototypes.
