Guided Augmented Independence Travel Aid (GAIT-Aid)

Lack of transportation access affects approximately 30% of people with functional limitations. In fact, people with functional limitations experience transportation access barriers four times more than those without limitations. With the emerging market of low cost augmented and virtual reality technology, perceptual user interfaces (PUI) that interact more naturalistically with end-users are providing rich personalized user experiences. The opportunity exists to develop low cost, PUI-based travel aides for persons with functional limitations that provide safe, yet complete trip planning, wayfinding, and navigation capabilities. GAIT-Aid is a personal AR travel aide for persons with functional limitations that will provide safe trip planning, wayfinding, and navigation capabilities. Phase II will develop a research roadmap for AR-enhanced navigation and wayfinding and expand the Phase I GAIT-Aid prototype into a fully functional system that can demonstrate navigation and wayfinding support across the public transit travel chain, optimizing multimodal input (voice and touch) and output (auditory, speech, and haptic) to the system. GAIT-Aid Phase II will have three main goals: extend user-centered design to 3D applications, explore AR compatible technologies, and develop/evaluate GAIT-Aid as a fully functioning system.