This technology is a computer vision system that improves accessibility of sports (e.g., tennis) to blind and low-vision fans by overlaying 3D spatialized audio in real-time.
Blind and low-vision (BLV) people are unable to fully experience the social activity of watching sports. While radio broadcasts give many the opportunity to listen along, it remains difficult for BLV fans to follow along due to a lack of knowledge on the relative location of objects in real-time. While efforts have been made to provide BLV fans spatialized information, these technologies require expensive, specialized sensors that may not be available at all sports games. Therefore, there is a need for a sensor-free method to render spatialized audio for BLV sports fans.
This system overlays 3D spatialized audio, termed Immersive A/V, on top of tennis match videos in real-time to aid BLV fans in gameplay recognition. The use of computer vision technology to track gameplay removes the need for specialized sensors.
This technology has been validated in a user experience study with 12 BLV users.
IR CU23071
Licensing Contact: Greg Maskel
