These colorful stickers are helping blind people find their way around | MIT Technology Review

Smart cities

These colorful stickers are helping blind people find their way around

If you have a cell-phone camera, the NaviLens system can give you vital information about where you are.

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June 6, 2019

A collection of Navilens’s colourful stickersNavilens

Over the last few months, strange pixelated stickers have been spreading across Barcelona’s transit system. Each is a 5×5 stack of brightly colored squares on a black card, like a disintegrated Space Invader.

Across the city’s network of buses, trains, trams, and a funicular that clambers up the steep hillside of Montjuïc, the tags are stuck near exits, platforms, escalators, ticket booths, intercoms, and passageways.

Navilens

This is not the work of some aspiring robot graffiti artist, however, but a program by Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona (TMB), the public transport service, to make the city easier to access and navigate for its thousands of visually impaired citizens.

The system has been developed by the Mobile Vision Research Lab at the University of Alicante, in partnership with Spanish startup NaviLens. Using a smartphone camera and a free app, visually impaired people can scan the codes and hear what information is stored within them.

This can be anything from public-transport timetables to obstacles they [...]

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