Projects

Talking Signs

Created by William Loughborough in 1979, Talking Lights was a system of infrared transmitters and receivers allowing blind and visually impaired travelers to quickly and easily "read signs" at a distance.

Magic Map

The Magic Map is an interactive 3D map installed at the Magical Bridge Playground in Palo Alto, California. It consists of a 1/100 scale 3D bronze representation of the playground, which includes over seventy play structures organized into multiple play zones and paths. When the user's index fingertip touches a specific feature on the map, the name and description of the feature are read aloud in audio. This interactivity allows visitors with visual impairments to navigate the map without requiring them to read braille.

Vestibular Function in AMD: Verticality Perception

To accurately perceive one’s own state and that of the surrounding environment, visual, vestibular and somatosensory inputs must be appropriately weighted and dynamically reweighted depending on the environment and task difficulty, as well as signal reliability (and availability). Aging is associated with an increase on visual dependence (a greater weighting of visual information). In this project we investigate how loss of visual information due to AMD affects this reweighting process and if an increase in visual dependence may be maladaptive in AMD.