Smartphone Audio Guide for Visual Impaired

Tactile paving for people with visual impairments in Japan has recently been enhanced with audio guidance, as the developers of the technology aim to improve the lives of people with partial sight and assist sighted tourists. The new braille blocks are marked with black stickers in special patterns. By scanning the coded blocks with a smartphone camera and app, users can listen to audio information about the location and its surroundings. The system was jointly developed by the laboratory of Kanazawa Institute of Technology and Tokyo-based W&M systems LLC.

Those behind the technology hope it can also be made available to tourists and foreigners as they walk the streets of Japan, whether they are sighted or not. The special braille blocks were first introduced in Kanazawa, central Japan, in 2019 and have since been installed in other areas, appearing at train stations, pedestrian streets and public offices in 10 prefectures, including Tokyo and Osaka, as of April. The developers plan to make the system available in multiple languages and are considering enabling it to answer questions by incorporating generative artificial intelligence capabilities.

More information:

https://japantoday.com/category/national/speaking-tactile-sidewalks-enrich-lives-of-visually-impaired

Best Song to Reduce Anxiety

Neuroscientists from the UK have specified which tunes give you the most bang for your musical buck. The study was conducted on participants who attempted to solve difficult puzzles as quickly as possible while connected to sensors. The puzzles induced a certain level of stress, and participants listened to different songs while researchers measured brain activity as well as physiological states that included heart rate, blood pressure, and rate of breathing.

The top song called "Weightless" produced a greater state of relaxation than any other music tested to date. It resulted in a 65% reduction in participants' overall anxiety, and a 35% reduction in their usual physiological resting rates. The group that created "Weightless", did so in collaboration with sound therapists. Its carefully arranged harmonies, rhythms, and bass lines help slow a listener's heart rate, reduce blood pressure, and lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

More information:

https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/neuroscience-says-listening-to-this-one-song-reduces-anxiety-by-up-to-65-percent.html

Optical Microphone Sees Sound Vibrations Reconstructing Music

A camera system developed by Carnegie Mellon University researchers can see sound vibrations with such precision and detail that it can reconstruct the music of a single instrument in a band or orchestra. Even the most high-powered and directed microphones can't eliminate nearby sounds, ambient noise and the effect of acoustics when they capture audio. The novel system developed in the School of Computer Science's Robotics Institute (RI) uses two cameras and a laser to sense high-speed, low-amplitude surface vibrations. These vibrations can be used to reconstruct sound, capturing isolated audio without inference or a microphone. The team completed several successful demos of their system's effectiveness and the quality of the sound reconstruction.

The CMU system dramatically improves upon past attempts to capture sound using computer vision. The team's work uses ordinary cameras that cost a fraction of the high-speed versions employed in past research while producing a higher quality recording. The dual-camera system can capture vibrations from objects in motion, such as the movements of a guitar while a musician plays it, and simultaneously sense individual sounds from multiple points. The system works by analyzing the differences in speckle patterns from images captured with a rolling shutter and a global shutter. An algorithm computes the difference in the speckle patterns from the two video streams and converts those differences into vibrations to reconstruct the sound.

More information:

https://techxplore.com/news/2022-06-newly-optical-microphone.html

Facebook Voice Commands for Oculus Quest 2

Facebook announced Voice Commands for the Oculus Quest last year. The original version, however, proved to be inconvenient. In order to access voice commands, you had to manually select the tool from the Oculus menu each and every time you wished to use it. This new update streamlines the process, allowing you to activate voice commands by saying the phrase ‘Hey Facebook’, followed by a specific command.

Facebook knows that users are going to have concerns, which is why ‘Hey Facebook’ is strictly an opt-in experience. You’ll still be able to use Voice Commands without having to say the wake word. To do that, you just use your controller or hand tracking to navigate to the home menu and then to the Experimental Features panel. From there you can then turn off the ‘Hey Facebook’ feature, giving you a little peace of mind.

More information:

https://vrscout.com/news/hey-facebook-voice-commands-oculus-quest/