The technology of virtual reality
and augmented reality is about
acquiring the information about what's out there
in the scene and then converting it to other uses.
All these things are coming together,
largely as a result of consumer technology,
not because someone wanted to
build a device for the blind.
We're just riding that wave and combining
these different devices and concepts
to make a new thing that never existed before.
The hololens creates a 3-D mesh of the physical space
to overlay virtual information on top of physical space.
What we did is to try to take advantage of that,
but overlay sound or auditory objects
on top of physical scenes.
Imagine you are in a world where
all the objects around you have voices.
When you first walk into a new space, 
you can simply have the objects call themselves out, 
one at a time from left to right.
"Floor lamp, laptop, picture..."
You can switch to Spotlight Mode and
you point your head towards different objects in the
scene, they get activated and speak their names to you.
It tries to communicate the visual world
on cognitive level, at the level of language,
at the level of understanding.
"Navigation started, follow me, follow me."
Essentially we invented this virtual guide.
It always stays a few steps ahead of the user.
It calls out "follow me" up two flights of stairs,
around a few corners,  a long stretch of corridor
and then a final turn into my office.
"Wow, that was pretty cool."
We have seven blind subjects 
and they all managed to do the task
- to get to my second floor office -
during their first round.
It was very gratifying to see that
a blind person could come to the lab, put on our device
and make their way through the building
without further assistance.
The sky's the limit for what kind of functionalities you want to build into a device like this
because it's essentially a software problem.
We'd like to see this device used and offered
at the entrance of large spaces
more or less the way you would adopt
an audio guide when you walk into a museum.
You plug the headphones in, and off you go.
