KINECT FOR THE BLIND!

Kinect for the Blind is Imagine Cup 2011 Software Design project of Tactile Viewers team, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. 2-nd place at Russian Finals.

It was designed to help visually impaired people (including completely blind) orient on streets. Particularly, with othis device person can 'feel' direction, distance and overall dimensions of obstacles at a distances greater than the length of a white cane. Second, this device allows track obstacles on all directions simultaneously (left, right, up, down), while cane is tracking only one direction at a time.

The project uses Kinect for Xbox 360 sensor, which is capable of viewing depth directly and not by reconstructing it from stereo images.

Here is an example how Kinect sees outer world. Depth scene on the right corresponds to the image on the left. Note that the image is not used to produce depth map as Kinect 'sees' distances directly by using infrared flash and receiver that measures per-pixel light delay.