Over the years, we’ve seen plenty of projects that use ultrasonic or time-of-flight sensors as object detection methods for the visually impaired. Ultrasonic sensors detect objects like sonar — they send sound pulses and measure the time it takes for the signal to bounce off the object and come back. Time-of-flight sensors do essentially the same thing, but with infrared light. In either case, the notifications often come as haptic feedback on the wrist or head or whatever limb the ultrasonic module is attached to. We often wonder why there aren’t commercially-made shoes that do this, but it turns out there are, and they’re about to get even better.
Today, Tec-Innovation makes shoes with ultrasonic sensors on the toes that can detect objects up to four meters away. The wearer is notified of obstacles through haptic feedback in the shoes as well as an audible phone notification via Bluetooth. The company teamed up with the Graz University of Technology in Austria to give the shoes robot vision that provides even better detail.
Ultrasonic is a great help, but it can’t detect the topography of the obstacle and tell a pothole from a rock from a wall. But if you have a camera on both feet, you can use the data to determine obstacle types and notify the user accordingly. These new models will still have the ultrasonic sensors to do the initial object detection, and use the cameras for analysis.
Whenever they do come out, the sensors will all be connected through the app, which paves the way for crowdsourced obstacle maps of various cities. The shoes will also be quite expensive. Can you do the same thing for less? Consider the gauntlet thrown!
We could all use some navigational help sometimes. Don’t want to look like a tourist? Get turn-by-turn directions in the corner of your eye.
Thanks for the tip, [Qes]!
I’m not gonna say the reason, but there’s a very obvious one why cameras-on-shoes isn’t a widely available commercial option outside of ebay or some dark street corners
I’m sure South Korean government is already pushing to ban this if they haven’t banned camera shoes.
Already in the UK
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/implementation-of-the-voyeurism-offences-act-2019
Yes, an app-connected network of people walking around with cameras on their feet. I can’t foresee any problems there.
And HaD wants to throw down a gauntlet encouraging people to build shoe mounted camera devices. Wow. Nothing wrong with walking around with homebrew camera devices on your shoes. I hope you guys have good insurance.
gotta be better than the Bundy Shoe Lights, but only slightly — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHEP8zwk-48
The first seasons were brilliant. I love those old episodes. There’s a brilliant documentary about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4tmyGvqNJk
Looooots of background info.
Honi soit qui mal y pense!
All you “upskirt” people are missing two points.
One, the user is blind. Two, it’s intended to run a CV algo to detect proximity. I’m pretty sure that there’s no need to store any of the images.
My toes are already pretty good at feeling things out with haptic feedback. Especially my coffee table legs in my living room and the feet of my bed frame late at night. No need to complicate things with ultrasonic sensors.
for improved toes remote sensing, glue whiskers on them. It´s also compatible with flip-flops
But can you detect lego bricks ?
Reminds me of the Beatles song
There is a law against upskirting in my country. These shoes would get people in serious trouble here.
BATFEET!
A cane is by far better and cheaper. Grass, asphalt, concrete, dirt, carpet. Rough or smooth. Curbs and walls. Because of the distinctive shape and color it alerts others around you about your disability. If you have good hearing it gives more insight from the sound it makes. It needs no batteries or phone. If you are totally blind rather than impaired, how are you supposed to use a smartphone?? Are there any without a superfluous display? Ultrasonic ranging to alert about obstacles at head height (branches or doorways) could be useful. This doesn’t do that. Who is supposed to pay for this? A cane costs $15.
Lots of useless and generally overpriced toys have been proposed. A cane works.
A cane is also useful for hitting idiots with cameras on their shoes…
I get the utrasonics in the shoes, but there’s a good reason nature put the eyes up top not down the bottom. I fail to see why you wouldn’t get the camera head or body mounted.
Exactly. Having a camera mounted on your head would also make it easier to feed the output into the ears.
A Lidar on the top of the head would be more effective and would not raise the tose privacy concerns
Covid enforcement: they should beep if someone is closer to 2m :-)
Yeah… asking blind people to control their shoes from their smartphone…. They didn’t actually get any blind people’s opinions before making these, did they?
Now, what we need is a smartphone with a braille screen. A matrix of actuating bumps could actually be useful as a screen.
Legally Blind people would beg to differ, blind is not used as a binary term where you can or can’t see, it’s a spectrum that start from the point where your vision is so bad it can not be corrected appropriately to no vision at all