Using augmented reality to support the understanding of three-dimensional concepts by blind people

Describing real and imaginary three-dimensional scenes from the observer’s viewpoint is an intuitive activity for visually non-impaired people, but it is difficult for congenitally blind people, since it involves abstract concepts, such as perspective, depth planes, occlusion, etc. This paper discusses these problems and presents physical environments and procedures supported by an augmented reality tool in order to help blind people to understand, describe and convert three-dimensional scenes into two-dimensional embossed representations. To verify how blind people can acquire these concepts, we developed an augmented reality application that worked as an audio spatial tutor to make the perspective-learning process easy. The application was tested with 10 congenitally blind people, who learned to understand the perspective concepts and who reported on the experience. Finally, we discuss the learning method and technical aspects, suggesting ways to improve the augmented reality application and how it can be released.