Project ARIA Information

Project ARIA is an ambitious project to develop a lightweight, all day wearable prosthetic for the blind. The system focuses on delivering high fidelity spatial awareness to a user, enabling independence, mobility and social empowerment for the blind. The overarching mission of the venture is to augment and enhance the perception of the world as experienced by blind people, and thereby reduce the risks, burdens, and the billions of dollars in costs that are brought on by vision loss in each year. The objectives of the ARIA device are: -Spatial Perception and Navigation: Enable a blind person to perceive and navigate an unfamiliar built environment without a cane or guide dog (indoor and outdoor). -Object Identification, Search, and Location: Enable a blind user to query ARIA for a particular object of interest, and be successfully guided to it. (E.g. “Guide me to the Savlon and the Band-Aids”) -Level The Social Playing Field: Enable a blind person to more proactively engage in social settings, employing the same social cues as sighted people (facial expressions, nodding, identifying and tracking known and unknown people) Project ARIA comprises a group of experienced technology entrepreneurs, researchers, scientists and engineers based in Sydney Australia. The team is a collaboration between ARIA Research Pty Ltd, Blind Citizens Australia, University of Sydney, University of Technology Sydney, the Australian Centre for Field Robotics (ACFR), Computational Intelligence and Brain Computer Interface Centre (CIBIC), and the Computer Audio Research laboratory (CARLab).