Use your ears to see.
Theia is a device that assists blind individuals by communicating surroundings through audio patterns
Demo
Spatial Communication (Click to play)
Object Communication (Click to play)
Theia is needed because it's unique and effective
Theia wearable-implementation
The majority of blind-assistant devices communicate large amounts of information badly since they heavily rely on verbal descriptions which are slow. Due to this, Theia relies on sound effects / audio patterns too which can be processed way more quickly
Theia runs on a Raspberry PI 4 and uses the Realsense D415 camera to recieve input, then algorithms (detailed in our research-paper) are used to convert the data to audio cues
Input Image
Depth-Data
Nearest-neighbor downsampling
Convert depth-data to sound
Play sound in specific order
The user then hears the audio through their headphones and can use the audio cues to understand their environment
The seminal research paper on Theia is Help the Blind See: Assistance for the Visually Impaired through Augmented Acoustic Simulation which provides an introduction and first iteration of Theia.
Our second paper, Theia: Assistive Environmental Communication via Audio Patterns for the Visually Impaired has the human-trials done on Theia, and a detailed explanation about the process and new knowledge gained from Theia. It also provides a new version that utilizes deep learning techniques.
Theia was made by Ritik Jalisatgi and Alex Mehta,
the code is open-source and you may find the community through its github-repository!
You may also contact the creators
through email
[email protected]
alex at alexmehta.xyz
Or through Discord
