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PEOPLE with blindness or acute visual impairment use canes, guide dogs or the help of others. Their individual connection with the cities they live in is restricted. Microsoft has an interesting and innovative solution to offer. Soundscapes, a smartphone app, aids the blind while they walk in their city. It requires them to use earphones.

Soundscapes offers the user voice guidance about the shops and places around – a store, an upcoming intersection, a museum or a landmark. Not navigation, but the app is meant to orient the person better and make it possible to be more in touch with the things around, including in conversation with others. The innovative bit about the voice cues is that they are directional and recorded in 3D (directional audio; left, right or front). This makes them even more helpful.

Soundscapes is free on Apple’s App store, but isn’t available for India; in fact, it is just restricted to a single city for now. The guidance needs to be crowdsourced and inevitably takes a while to build up. The wait for this potentially useful technology will be well worth it.