NAV-VIR: an audio-tactile virtual environment to assist visually impaired people

This paper introduces the NAV-VIR system, a multimodal virtual environment to assist visually impaired people in virtually discovering and exploring unknown areas from the safety of their home. The originality of NAV-VIR resides in (1) an optimized representation of the surrounding topography, the spatial gist, based on human spatial cognition models and the sensorimotor supplementation framework, and (2) a multimodal orientation-aware immersive virtual environment relying on two synergetic interfaces: an interactive force feedback tablet, the F2T, and an immersive HRTF-based 3D audio simulation relying on binaural recordings of real environments. This paper presents NAV-VIR functionalities and its preliminary evaluation through a simple shape and movement perception task.