The Scottish Tech Army has launched its Soundscape service, which helps visually impaired people to independently navigate their way around urban environments via audio.
The service, which was built on extensive development carried out by Microsoft Research and released under an open-source licence, will provide a replacement for the Microsoft service which will no longer be available beyond August 2023.
The Soundscape service itself comes in the form of a spatial audio mobile app for the iPhone. It augments the information typically provided by navigation apps, providing far greater contextual awareness by transforming ordinary sound into a three-dimensional experience.
