Ambio Urban Navigator

My ojective for my thesis project was to improve the quality of life for the visually impaired by restoring their ability to self-navigate. This device enables the user to perceive distant objects via the sensory plasticity inherently available in humans that can translate the visual into the haptic. This device allows the user to achieve depth estimation, navigation, and object avoidance at the same level as a sighted person.

When I began this project, my goal was to investigate sound and its role in our lives. I discovered that we are surrounded by objects that create noise as a by-product of their function, affecting our health and quality of life, not to mention our opinion of the object itself. I proposed that sound, in and of itself, is not often a ‘considered’ element of a product and rarely a deliberate design feature. What if sound became a criterion for design? What would be the effects it could have on the look, feel, texture and overall experience of an object? After delving deep into this area of research I realized that the most powerful design application from this type of thinking was in focusing on how the blind use sound as a means of navigation as well as a crucial indicator of their surroundings.

Too often, feedback, being the sensory information the user receives while interacting with an object, inherent to every product, is forgotten, ignored, or simply limited to the visual, rather than auditory. Both culturally and biologically we humans are visually dominant and as such, most of the objects we create and the things we value appeal largely to this sense alone. As designers, we are trained to load a product with visual details, frequently overwhelming the user.

We rarely experiment with the other four senses – touch, taste, smell, and sound. The sense of sound, of hearing, is common to most humans and the way the brain processes sound is as predictable as that of an image. My objective took shape to embody a sensory device for the blind that took advantage of their heightened senses of touch and hearing to allow them to more easily navigate their world. Ambio uses ultrasonic sensors coded to trigger a set of scaled vibrations in the thumb grip that correspond to objects obstructing the user’s path. Cognitively, the Ambio makes use of visual-tactile substitution during which the skin is able to represent information in two dimensions and integrate signals over time which means that visual patterns and tactual patterns are functionally interchangeable.

From the research phase, through exploratory sketching, all the way to alpha prototype testing, the Ambio Urban Navigator proved to be a worthy design challenge with a clear socially conscious purpose, and millions of potential beneficiaries worldwide.