There are various scenarios in which an individual may need or wish to use assistive technology for receiving information about the space around him/her. For example, visually impaired persons (VIPs) today cannot autonomously engage with and experience the environment around them. Many VIPs may be dependent on sighted persons to help them interpret what is around them. VIPs may also rely on technologies or tools that possibly help the VIP with discrete functional aspects, such as avoiding obstacles or navigating from one point to another.
Previous solutions for VIPs fall under the category of specific task-based assistance. Some examples include: augmented white cane with ultrasound sensors and vibrators to indicate position of obstacles beyond the range of the cane; computer vision based approaches to detect obstacles and entities and to provide an obstacle free path to reach a desired destination without bumping into any entities along the way; laser based entity detection and ranging for conveying the information about entities and obstacles to the blind; face recognition technologies to convey the identity of the persons in front using image capture and deep learning; emotion and age recognition of people around using similar deep learning approaches; scene description from images using deep learning; computer vision and machine learning approaches to identify and describe entities and textual information on entities and displays; earcons and audiocons to convey visual information using sound; spatial sound to indicate position of entities; and sensory substitution approaches: visual to haptics and visual to audio.
The above examples provide specific task-based assistance, but do not provide an interactive and responsive presentation of data to the user based on the need and context of the user.