VR Training to Facilitate Blind Photography for Navigation

Smartphone-based navigation apps allow blind and visually impaired (BVI) people to take images or videos to complete various tasks such as determining a user 's location, recognizing objects, and detecting obstacles. The quality of the images and videos significantly affects the performance of these systems, but manipulating a camera to capture clear images with proper framing is a challenging task for BVI users. This research explores the interactions between a camera and BVI users in assistive navigation systems through interviews with BVI participants. We identified the form factors, applications, and challenges in using camera-based navigation systems and designed an interactive training app to improve BVI users' skills in using a camera for navigation. In this paper, we describe a novel virtual environment of the training app and report the preliminary results of a user study with BVI participants.