Breakthrough AI transforms the way people with visual damage experience the world, giving them tools to discover, understand and experience the beauty of unknown places as never before.
Study: The AI system facilitates people with blindness and low vision in interpretation and experience of unknown environments. Credit Picture: Angel Santana Garcia/Shutterstock.com
A team of researchers from China has developed an artificial intelligence system (AI), which can potentially help people with visual impairments explore, understand and enjoy the unknown environments that surround them. The study is published in Artificial intelligence of nature portfolio.
Background
Investigation of natural environments, such as parks, has a significant positive impact on physical and mental health. However, people with low vision or blindness are often excluded from these benefits, as appropriate aids are not available to help them take preventively participate with them.
Existing auxiliary solutions developed to guide people with visual impairments mainly focused on providing functional assistance, such as navigation and avoiding obstacles, allowing them to passive nature.
Visual problems often feel helpless while exploring unknown environments. This usually means that they are based on family members, friends or volunteers for help, which prevents their ability from exploring and actively understanding unknown environments, as well as remembering and communicating with other visual impairments for their journey.
A team of China -based researchers developed a system based on AI called VIPTOUR to provide visionary problems a sense of independence in unknown environments.
How does VIPTour work?
VIPTOUR is an AI system containing a set of light, portable consumer devices (camera and smartphone) and a new deep learning algorithm network called Focusformer. Effective techniques of multiple interaction interaction, such as the interaction of sound and hierarchical tactile interaction, lead the interaction between visual impairments and VIPTour users.
Focusformer considers aesthetics, freshness (innovation) and basic needs (including navigation and safety) as the main factors for exporting important information from complex, unknown environments and excluding unnecessary visual details. This reduces cognitive load on visual impairments.
Focusformer converts huge amounts of information into a structured, sparse and hierarchical personalized chart. Based on this well -structured graph, Focusformer interacts with visually impaired users through a smartphone app, understands their preferences and provides personalized help through an adapter.
He is trained with thousands of public tourism videos by self -service tourists, which is beneficial to effectively reduce aesthetic bias.
The VIPTOUR system also has options for recording, storing and exchanging experiences, facilitating emotional communications between people with visual impairments and promoting the exchange of knowledge and experiences on their social networks.
The basic technical innovation of VIPTOUR lies in the multi -choice Focusformer network. This approach uses a background subnet to filter common objects, a subnet of attraction to identify the notes, a fresh subject to discover new features, and a subnet of needs trained in research conducted by participants. These subnetworks are combined to select, sort and present the most relevant information for each user.
The VIPTOUR system also uses a Blv-in-the-Loop adapter, which updates its real-time recommendations based on individual users’ comments, such as “likes” and “dislike”, thereby allowing personalization.
User knowledge of VIPTOUR
The VIPTOUR system was tested in 33 people with blindness or low vision and collected self -reported emotional experiences for analysis.
In terms of auxiliary performance, the study found that the VIPTour system has effectively helped people with visual impairments to actively explore and understand the unknown environments, authorized them with precise and long -term memories and allowed them to communicate with their peers.
Analyzing the self -reported experiences extensively, the study found that participants who used VIPTOUR successfully achieved a 67.9% of positive emotional reaction, an increase of 94.7% in stimulation, 772.73% increase in accuracy of cognitive mapping and 200% increase.
In users’ ratings, VIPTour usability scores were consistently over 80 out of 100, comparable or better than other auxiliary tools for people with visual impairments.
Normal measures, including electrodermic activity and heart rate variability, have shown significant improvements with the use of VIPTOUR, indicating increased emotional commitment.
Importance
The study highlights the possible uses of the VIPTOUR system led by AI to providing people with visual impairments with a pleasant and unforgettable experience while actively exploring unknown environments. These experiences can greatly enhance their emotional state and improve their overall quality of life.
Existing evidence suggests that the presentation of organized and information involved can enhance a person’s level of pleasure and facilitate deeper memory maintenance. People have a natural tendency to process well -structured and meaningful information, which makes their experiences more enjoyable and unforgettable.
This human tendency can be explained by the concept of cognitive discretion, which shows that the clear and organized presentation of information reduces cognitive burden on individuals. Then this helps them to channel spiritual resources to understand and integrate the content. This improved processing is causing a positive response, as individuals perceive the information more enjoyable.
In addition, the interaction between new and well -known information affects the impact of organized and interesting memory information. New information stimulates curiosity and enhance attention, while well -known information provides cognitive comfort and cohesion.
Presenting information in a structured and attractive way can balance innovation and familiarity, which helps maintain the interest and commitment of individuals.
Focusformer’s self -presented training with thousands of unpaid public tourist videos has effectively recorded the cognitive discretion, revealing statistical relationships between different concepts in tourist scenes. This approach eliminates the possible bias in the magazine’s preferences and trains the model to export only relevant information.
These personalized Focusformer design estimates have allowed the VIPTOUR system to successfully model the desired cognitive discretion, thereby improving the tourist experience for visually impaired problems.
It is worth noting that the impact of VIPTour depends on the quality of the underlying AI techniques, such as the detection of objects and the production of semantic graphs. Future improvements in these methods could further enhance the performance of the system.
Magazine report:
- Lin H. 2025. The AI system facilitates people with blindness and low vision in interpretation and experience of unknown environments. Artificial Intelligence NPJ. https://doi.org/10.1038/S44387-025-00006-W https://www.nature.com/articles/S44387-025-00006-W
