Digital content devices and augmented reality for assisting low vision people
Résumé
There are around 285 million of visually impaired people in the world. Aged related Macular Degeneration (AMD) is for example one of the most important visual disease in occidental countries. The forecasts of the World Health Organization translate a major risk which it will be necessary to face, and developing adapted tools is urgent.
Nowadays, the only primary aids offered to visually impaired people for independent mobility are in fact different types of canes. Even if electronic travel aids exist and even if they were initially devised to replace canes, they are ultimately used as secondary aids. The main origin of such a relative unsuccessful result in assisting with navigation is the lack of significant additional information provided by electronic travel aids to low vision individuals. During the past years many research teams have proposed some assistive technologies or solutions to compensate vision impaired troubles. Nevertheless, little researches have been conducted on wearable systems exploiting the residual vision of visually impaired people to assist them in mobility even if professionals working in the field of low vision agree to say that it is important to stimulate the residual vision early in the sight-loss process.
Visual media are becoming more abundant in our daily life and a core constituent of information and communication technologies. This leads the emergence of new needs, changes in behavior, consumption patterns and distribution practices. Today people are less and less refractory for new technologies like smartphones or other embedded systems.
Such elements motivate the overview presented in the chapter we propose. This overview is dedicated to analyze opportunities of augmented reality devices in particular eyewear solutions for visually impaired in a context of mobility. The discussion rests on the interest to focus on more recent developments in smartphones and in augmented reality eyewear solution usable in real mobility. First experimental works demonstrate the interest to progress in this direction for helpful solutions adapted and easily adaptable according to the diseases of patients. We intend to show that by adopting credible tools acknowledging the importance of significantly improving visual impaired condition, mobile visual aid systems answer a critical societal problem.