Mobility updates

00:33 S1

Hello everyone. Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from October the 22nd, 2024. I'm Stephen Jolley, great to have you with us - listening maybe through Vision Australia Radio, associated stations of the Radio Reading Network or the Community Radio Network. There is also the podcast. To catch that, all you need to do is search for the two words Talking Tech and Dan. It can all come usually on a Tuesday afternoon just after it's been produced. Another option is to ask your Siri device or smart speaker to play Vision Australia Radio talking tech podcast. Vision Australia radio talking tech podcast.

With me, Vision Australia's national access technology manager, Damo McMorrow. Hey, Damo.

01:17 S2

Hi Stephen.

01:19 S1

This month, which is very much a month around vision awareness and vision protection... and of course we had International White Cane Day just a week or so ago on October the 15th. So let's talk about getting around today. And the first thing I'd like to mention is an Australian initiative. Be good to give a shout out to that. And it's an initiative to make available a new kind of tip for the cane called sensible. And where the developers have gone to a lot of trouble to have something that will cover a lot of different services very smoothly and perhaps put less stress on the arm. It can be found at sensible.com.au - sensible dot com dot AU. It's good to see these Australian initiatives, Damo.

02:09 S2

It absolutely is. And for anyone who's ever got their cane stuck in a crack in the pavement and winded themselves, I'm sure it would be a welcome innovation.

02:19 S1

Yes. So, sensible.com.au ... Now let's talk about the higher technology sort of stuff that's going on. And there are some interesting devices that are in development or very early stages of availability. Tell me about the Glide.

02:37 S2

Yeah, the Glide is an interesting one. Glidance, the company that's producing that one. And they are at this point a startup. So it's not currently available. And I think they're initially going to launch it in the US and the UK. And they have taken some pre-orders from those countries. It is essentially a guide robot-type device. It's about 8in or 20cm tall, and it has a telescopic handle that the user holds onto, and it has some wheels underneath it and it rolls along. You're holding the handle by steering the power assisted wheels. It provides guidance, and it has a range of different sensors to help you with things like obstacle avoidance and that type of thing. 

So quite an interesting one. I'm not quite sure how I feel about it personally, and whether I would ever be willing to swap my dog guide for a robot device at this stage, I absolutely wouldn't. But it's it's certainly an interesting concept, and there's been quite a bit of interest in it overseas.

03:47 S1

Yes, it's developed in the United States. I think they're intending it would be available in about a year's time in the United States. And I imagine about two years or so before we would see it. And I think it's about 1500 bucks as they're anticipating.

04:03 S2

Yes. That's right.

04:04 S1

Not too bad.

04:06 S2

No. And I think for a lot of people, you know, it does have the potential to perhaps give them a different type of mobility to... what they're currently experiencing. The device itself, as I understand it, is sort of a rounded shape. So I picture it as being like a bucket with a telescopic handle off one side of it. But given that it's not available here, I haven't actually been able to get a hands-on look at one of these.

04:28 S1

But you have looked at a prototype of a thing called a Biped.

04:31 S2

Yes. The Noah product from Biped 2, which is based in Sweden, and this one is described as a harness. So it is a wearable device, and you have the sort of metal band of the harness goes around the back of your neck. And then there are two box-like structures that sit against your shoulders, pointing forward. The batteries go into the part that goes around the back of your neck, and in the two structures you have sort of all of the smarts, including the cameras and sensors. 

Now, the idea with this one is that you wear the device and it does obstacle detection. It has some AI built into it, which is designed to help you find a way around obstacles. And when paired with your phone and used with a set of aftershocks bone conduction type headphones, it will also give you some spoken feedback, so it'll give you distances to obstacles. It also can do GPS navigation. So they've tried to make it sort of an all in one, rather than having a GPS device, a cane or a dog and a perhaps a pair of smart glasses, they've tried to sort of integrate all of those different tools into one device.

06:00 S1

What's interesting about this device, and also the glide, is that they're very much software dependent, of course. So once you buy the basic device, the hardware may not change, but the software will evolve over time.

06:15 S2

Yes. That's right. I mean, I suspect with the Biped unit because it contains camera technology, you know, as LiDAR technology and those things develop, they may revise the hardware at different times to give it, you know, greater resolution and be able to feed more information to the eye in the back end, if you like. But yes, a lot of these things are very much software-based.

06:39 S1

Is the Biped far away from being available in Australia?

06:42 S2

I don't think so... I believe that Vision Australia will be offering it. There's... some discussions and things ongoing at the moment, but I'm hopeful that we will be able to see that one fairly soon.

06:56 S1

I know you can't give me an exact price, but what sort of money are we talking about?

07:00 S2

I believe it's around the 7500 dollars mark. It's not a cheap piece of equipment, and it's something that I think you would have to be really fairly sure that it's going to suit your particular needs. O&M orientation mobility is a very individualised thing. You know, it'll be awesome for some people and for others, it definitely won't suit them.

07:22 S1

Lots of trialling will have to be available, I imagine, for expensive purchases.

07:27 S2

Yes, absolutely.

07:28 S1

You've been doing some work recently with your phone, your iPhone, using it to get some orientation or mobility tips. Where are you at with that?

07:39 S2

So there's a couple of things that I've been experimenting with, particularly with the update to iOS 18. The fact that some of the navigation modes or camera modes that you used to have to access through the magnifier app are now available on the rotor, so it becomes very easy to activate them on the fly. There's a couple of things that I've been experimenting with.

A few weeks ago, on a recent trip to Melbourne, we were staying in a hotel where we were about as far away from the lifts as it was possible to be, and it was one of those situations where the corridor had about 20 or 30 different twists and turns and changes of direction, and all of the parts of the corridor kind of felt the same. So in that instance, I used the text detection and the door detection features in the iPhone Pro models to be able to identify the door of my room, and also be able to read the room numbers, because there's nothing more disconcerting than trying a door and discovering that it's not yours, and that you might be frightening the life out of the person on the other side of the door. That was actually very helpful. 

The other thing that I've been experimenting with a little bit is the people detection mode, which has been around for a while, but I've never really used it in any great detail, but it can be quite helpful if you're trying to, for example, follow someone, and also if you're getting onto a crowded bus or train. I don't know about other dog guide users, but mine will find me a seat, whether it's a vacant one or a or occupied, particularly if the occupant happens to be eating a pie or something like that. So being able to actually identify whether a seat is vacant before you put your hand out or go to sit down is pretty helpful. 

So I have been using some of these built-in features over the last few weeks and found them to be quite helpful. I should stress that there is a bit of a limitation in that they don't all work on all models. Some of these features do require the LiDAR feature available in the Pro Series, iPhone 16 Pro, 15 Pro, 14 Pro, and so on in order to get the most out of them.

09:59 S1

Yes, I'm very interested in those ones and very convenient. Let's talk about now the Meta Ray-Ban glasses and IRA. There's been some action there.

10:09 S2

Yes there has. So for a few weeks IRA have had in a sort of a closed Beta operating where you could register for being able to access IRA through your Meta smart glasses. So it gives you a essentially a hands free option, similar to perhaps what you get through things like the envision glasses or those that remember the original IRA glasses when they first came out. The implementation is not perfect at this stage. They are using the WhatsApp application to do the video calls. 

But on Monday, IRA opened that Beta program up so that any IRA user can, if they have a set of Meta smart glasses, they can access the IRA service through them. So when you update your IRA explorer app, there's now a customised call option. And one of the options you can select there is meta Ray-Ban glasses. They're very keen for people's feedback, and they're also encouraging people to lobby Meta to open up their API, as it were, so that they can work directly with the IRA application.

11:23 S1

The name Dolphin's been around a while.

11:25 S2

So Dolphin is a British company, and as you say, they've been around for a while. I can remember using Hal, which was their DOS screen reader back in the day, and I'm showing my age here I know, but their Supernova product has also been around for a while, and it is a predominantly, I guess, a screen enhancement program, although it does come in a few different flavors. So there is the magnifier-only version. There is a version that is a magnifier with some speech functionality for reading documents, reading emails, that type of thing. And then they have a version which is a full magnifier and full screen reader. 

It is sort of, I suppose, a competitor product to Zoom text and Fusion. Very similar functionality. So it does your speech, your magnification. There is a USB version available, and it can also be paired with a number of different webcams and document cameras to provide magnification for printed documents and distance magnification, depending on the camera that you're using.

12:33 S1

It just runs in the Windows environment.

12:35 S2

It is a Windows application.

12:36 S1

Yes, it's had an update recently.

12:39 S2

Yes it has. So Dolphin have on the 10th of October released version 23.03, which addresses some compatibility issues with the latest versions of Microsoft Office 365. Those of you that use Office 365 would know that on a fairly regular basis, Microsoft release updates and sometimes they work well, and other times they sort of introduce accessibility challenges. There are the usual array of bug fixes and enhancements, and also some support for some new webcam and document camera devices. 

So those people who are already using a version of Supernova 23, you should get that update automatically. So the next time you start up Supernova, it should prompt you to install the update. Of course, if you're running an earlier version of Supernova, then you would need to sort of purchase an upgrade in order to get version 23. But once you do that, you would automatically be looking at 23.03.

13:44 S1

What's the best way to find out about Supernova? If people are curious after hearing you talk about it.

13:50 S2

It is available through the Vision Store website. You can also download directly from Dolphin and we'll put the link in the show notes. You can actually download a fully functional 30 day trial of Supernova, so it's not a timed demo, in that it will work, you know, all day, every day for 30 days and give you an opportunity to give it a really good road test, as it were. Before you buy, it is slightly cheaper than Fusion and Zoomtext, and there are a number of different upgrade options available in terms of the software maintenance agreements as well.

14:28 S1

Dolphin Supernova. Before we go, a reminder you can find details of what we've been talking about in this and previous editions of the program from varadio.org/talking tech. varadio.org/talking tech .... and to write to the program Damo?

14:46 S2

Damo dot McMorrow... m c m o r r o w... at Vision Australia dot org.

14:54 S1

damo.mcmorrow@visionaustralia.org ... This has been Talking Tech, with me has been Vision Australia's national access technology manager Damo McMorrow. I'm Stephen Jolley. Stay safe. We'll talk more tech next week. See you.