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How to tell when your data takes the scenic route
Technology Just follow the beeps to find your way
IT’S not quite bat-style echolocation, but people could soon use sound to help them see. A portable navigational aid that transmits soft, low-pitched beeps directly to the inner ear has been designed to help blind people navigate around cities or guide firefighters through smokeclogged buildings. The system guides users with beeps that appear to come from whatever direction the person needs to head in. “We have the user simply walk towards the sound,” says Bruce Walker at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, who created the device with colleague Frank Dellaert. To calculate the user’s position and the direction they are facing, the device uses a processor in a backpack to combine GPS location readings with data from cameras and motion and tilt sensors attached to a headband or helmet. This
How to tell when your data takes the scenic route IF YOU support net neutrality – the principle that all data packets routed around the internet should receive equal priority – soon you could help the cause personally by donating your spare computing power. 26 | NewScientist | 19 August 2006
information is fed into a virtual 3D model of the streetscape or building the person is navigating to calculate which direction the person should walk towards to reach their destination. The device can then generate a series of beeps to guide them. To make the beeps appear to come from a particular direction, the system varies the timing and intensity of the vibrations transmitted to each earpiece. For example, to make a beep seem to come from the person’s right, the right earpiece will vibrate louder and fractionally before the left, say Walker and Dellaert, who this week announced the development of their prototype, called System for Wearable Audio Navigation (SWAN). The “earpieces” in fact sit just under each ear lobe and vibrate the skull directly to transmit sounds straight to the inner ear, bypassing the outer ear entirely. “It’s a back-door way of getting sound into the user’s inner ear,” says Walker. The designers say that this has advantages over existing systems to help blind people navigate, which tend to use speech to impart directions. This can be distracting and imprecise, says Walker. “How do you get someone to turn 57 degrees to the right using words?” As well as being more precise, beeps mean the
Imitating the popular SETI@home project, which harnesses 150,000 home computers worldwide to help search for signs of alien life, a group of politically minded bloggers and techies is planning to enlist a similar army of PCs to monitor the net for non-neutral data routing. Each PC would use its idle power to test whether broadband providers are deliberately slowing data down. US broadband providers, such as AT&T and Verizon, which ferry data packets along fibre-optic cables, have recently started selling services such as video and voice-over IP (VOIP), sparking fears that these companies could slow down data packets from competing providers
“The beeps appear to come from whatever direction the user needs to head in” user can still listen to what else is happening or communicate with others, which could be vital for a team searching for survivors in a burning building, say. Anne Taylor, director of access technology at the National Federation of the Blind in Baltimore, Maryland, says speech interfaces are intuitive and do not require users to learn a new set of sounds. Also, without a Braille option, people who are deaf and
blind could not use the new aid. Even so, Walker and Dellaert plan to recruit volunteers to test their system later this year. One remaining challenge will be to get hold of detailed maps of buildings and cities. Walker suggests that satellite images such as those provided by Google Earth could be processed by image-recognition software to annotate maps with trees, houses and other obstacles. He also plans to incorporate new navigation aids to help people indoors or near high-rise buildings, where there may be no GPS signal. Celeste Biever ●
SEEING WITH SOUND A new navigation system guides the user and indicates landmarks and hazards using audio cues NAVIGATION BEEPS: guide the listener along a predetermined path, from a start point to final destination via intermediate waypoints OBJECT SOUNDS: indicate the location and type of objects around the listener, such as furniture, doorways, fountains etc SURFACE TRANSITION SOUNDS: signify a change in the terrain, such as from sidewalk to grass, carpet to tile, level floor to stairway, curb cuts, etc LOCATIONS SOUNDS: indicate specific offices, classrooms, shops, buildings, bus stops and so on
GPS SIGNALS TILT AND MOTION SENSORS HEADBAND CAMERA
BACKPACK containing GPS sensor and computer loaded with map files and building plans
ANNOTATIONS: brief speech messages recorded by users provide additional details about the environment. For example, “Deep puddle here when it rains”
such as YouTube and Skype. However, there is currently no way to monitor whether deprioritisation is actually occurring, and a US Senate committee recently rejected draft “net neutrality” legislation that would outlaw deliberate “packet deprioritisation”, in which packets get bumped down the transmission queue (www.newscientisttech.com/ article/dn9435.html). Deliberate deprioritisation is hard to detect because there is always a chance packets can be shunted to the back of the queue non-maliciously when there is heavy traffic, says Tom Evslin, a technology consultant based in Stowe, Vermont. His solution is to use the distributed approach to
single out deliberate deprioritisation. Each volunteer would download software that triggers their computer to send out test packets called pings to various websites. Because pings automatically trigger a return packet, they can be used to measure the speed of a connection between two computers. Each probe PC reports its results to a central server that can then work out from all the ping times whether packets from certain websites are being deprioritised, and if so by which broadband providers, says Evslin. He outlined the idea at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 8 August. Celeste Biever, Boston ● www.newscientist.com
IT’S not quite bat-style echolocation, but people could soon use sound to help them see. A portable navigational aid that transmits soft, low-pitched beeps directly to the inner ear has been designed to help blind people navigate around cities or guide firefighters through smokeclogged buildings. The system guides users with beeps that appear to come from whatever direction the person needs to head in. “We have the user simply walk towards the sound,” says Bruce Walker at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, who created the device with colleague Frank Dellaert. To calculate the user’s position and the direction they are facing, the device uses a processor in a backpack to combine GPS location readings with data from cameras and motion and tilt sensors attached to a headband or helmet. This
How to tell when your data takes the scenic route IF YOU support net neutrality – the principle that all data packets routed around the internet should receive equal priority – soon you could help the cause personally by donating your spare computing power. 26 | NewScientist | 19 August 2006
information is fed into a virtual 3D model of the streetscape or building the person is navigating to calculate which direction the person should walk towards to reach their destination. The device can then generate a series of beeps to guide them. To make the beeps appear to come from a particular direction, the system varies the timing and intensity of the vibrations transmitted to each earpiece. For example, to make a beep seem to come from the person’s right, the right earpiece will vibrate louder and fractionally before the left, say Walker and Dellaert, who this week announced the development of their prototype, called System for Wearable Audio Navigation (SWAN). The “earpieces” in fact sit just under each ear lobe and vibrate the skull directly to transmit sounds straight to the inner ear, bypassing the outer ear entirely. “It’s a back-door way of getting sound into the user’s inner ear,” says Walker. The designers say that this has advantages over existing systems to help blind people navigate, which tend to use speech to impart directions. This can be distracting and imprecise, says Walker. “How do you get someone to turn 57 degrees to the right using words?” As well as being more precise, beeps mean the
Imitating the popular SETI@home project, which harnesses 150,000 home computers worldwide to help search for signs of alien life, a group of politically minded bloggers and techies is planning to enlist a similar army of PCs to monitor the net for non-neutral data routing. Each PC would use its idle power to test whether broadband providers are deliberately slowing data down. US broadband providers, such as AT&T and Verizon, which ferry data packets along fibre-optic cables, have recently started selling services such as video and voice-over IP (VOIP), sparking fears that these companies could slow down data packets from competing providers
“The beeps appear to come from whatever direction the user needs to head in” user can still listen to what else is happening or communicate with others, which could be vital for a team searching for survivors in a burning building, say. Anne Taylor, director of access technology at the National Federation of the Blind in Baltimore, Maryland, says speech interfaces are intuitive and do not require users to learn a new set of sounds. Also, without a Braille option, people who are deaf and
blind could not use the new aid. Even so, Walker and Dellaert plan to recruit volunteers to test their system later this year. One remaining challenge will be to get hold of detailed maps of buildings and cities. Walker suggests that satellite images such as those provided by Google Earth could be processed by image-recognition software to annotate maps with trees, houses and other obstacles. He also plans to incorporate new navigation aids to help people indoors or near high-rise buildings, where there may be no GPS signal. Celeste Biever ●
SEEING WITH SOUND A new navigation system guides the user and indicates landmarks and hazards using audio cues NAVIGATION BEEPS: guide the listener along a predetermined path, from a start point to final destination via intermediate waypoints OBJECT SOUNDS: indicate the location and type of objects around the listener, such as furniture, doorways, fountains etc SURFACE TRANSITION SOUNDS: signify a change in the terrain, such as from sidewalk to grass, carpet to tile, level floor to stairway, curb cuts, etc LOCATIONS SOUNDS: indicate specific offices, classrooms, shops, buildings, bus stops and so on
GPS SIGNALS TILT AND MOTION SENSORS HEADBAND CAMERA
BACKPACK containing GPS sensor and computer loaded with map files and building plans
ANNOTATIONS: brief speech messages recorded by users provide additional details about the environment. For example, “Deep puddle here when it rains”
such as YouTube and Skype. However, there is currently no way to monitor whether deprioritisation is actually occurring, and a US Senate committee recently rejected draft “net neutrality” legislation that would outlaw deliberate “packet deprioritisation”, in which packets get bumped down the transmission queue (www.newscientisttech.com/ article/dn9435.html). Deliberate deprioritisation is hard to detect because there is always a chance packets can be shunted to the back of the queue non-maliciously when there is heavy traffic, says Tom Evslin, a technology consultant based in Stowe, Vermont. His solution is to use the distributed approach to
single out deliberate deprioritisation. Each volunteer would download software that triggers their computer to send out test packets called pings to various websites. Because pings automatically trigger a return packet, they can be used to measure the speed of a connection between two computers. Each probe PC reports its results to a central server that can then work out from all the ping times whether packets from certain websites are being deprioritised, and if so by which broadband providers, says Evslin. He outlined the idea at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 8 August. Celeste Biever, Boston ● www.newscientist.com