Feel The View

By GTB, Rome, Italy

For Ford

Winner in category Health & Wellness

In subcategory Consumer-Digital

WPPED Cream
Project Description
We developed a unique device that turns car windows into a tactile screen for the blind. The device transforms the landscape into vibrations transmitted on the car windows, allowing the visually impaired to ‘see’ the view through their fingertips.
“Life is out there. Are you?” is the positioning of the New Ford EcoSport. In order to convey this message, we launched a number of projects to invite people to enjoy car trips. With Feel the view we wanted to give the chance to enjoy the beauty of travelling to everyone, even the blind.
An estimated 285 million people in the world are visually impaired; this includes legally blind and visually limited persons. Even in our tech-era, these people are still deprived from enjoying the beauty of car trips.
Feel the View starts a new era of innovative technologies allowing the blind to get to know the world out there.
Agency Solution
We teamed up with Aedo, a digital engineering studio specialized in visually impaired projects, and Views International, a charity for blind and visually impaired. Together we studied how blind people discover the world around them through two senses: touch and hearing.
We then developed an innovative language that allows the blind to experience the surroundings not via description, as the braille, but through a real representation of reality. A representation that the blind can experience by touching the different shapes of the world around described by up to 255 levels of vibrations. Plus, the different audio frequencies of the vibrations help the blind to recognize a shape from another. The device is specifically designed to be used by the blind in an easy way, and entirely autonomously. The visually impaired person takes a picture of the view through an easy to reach button. The picture is then converted into a grey scale image. Every shade of grey is translated into a vibration of different intensity on the car window, allowing the blind to visualize the landscape. The brighter the area, the higher the vibration. Moreover, an AI recognizes the elements of the picture associating a vocal description of every item of the landscaped while is being touched by the blind. All the process happens instantaneously.
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