AIGuide: An Augmented Reality Hand Guidance Application for People with Visual Impairments

Locating and grasping objects is a critical task in people’s daily lives. For people with visual impairments, this task can be a daily struggle. The support of augmented reality frameworks in smartphones has the potential to overcome the limitations of current object detection applications designed for people with visual impairments. We present AIGuide, a self-contained offline smartphone application that leverages augmented reality technology to help users locate and pick up objects around them. We conducted a user study to validate its effectiveness at providing guidance, compare it to other assistive technology form factors, evaluate the use of multimodal feedback, and provide feedback about the overall experience. Our results show that AIGuide is a promising technology to help people with visual impairments locate and acquire objects in their daily routine.