21 thoughts on “Seeing-Eye Shoes Pair Computer Vision With Haptic Feedback

  1. 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

  2. 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.

    1. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

    1. 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

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