Whether it’s going to work, school, or meeting friends, getting where we want to go is a basic part of our everyday lives. But for blind and visually impaired people, navigation can get complicated, fast. “I’ve met blind people who often end up getting so tired navigating that they have to give up and go home, because it takes constant effort and planning, memorising everything you need to know,” Dreamwaves CEO Hugo Furtado says.

To liberate blind and visually impaired people from this burden, Hugo’s award-winning Austrian startup has developed the waveOut app that opens up navigation without maps or screens. With a mission to break down barriers to urban mobility, the Portuguese entrepreneur believes waveOut can unlock a host of benefits for users. It promises more employment opportunities, better physical and mental health, improved social integration and safety. But reaching that goal means transforming how blind and visually impaired people can get around our towns and cities. It also demands a solution that is accurate, scalable and sustainable.

Trail of breadcrumbs

The waveOut navigation app responds to this challenge by placing virtual audio waypoints in spaces like metro stations to help guide blind and visually impaired users to their destinations. Through the user’s headphones these waypoint markers can sound like the beat of a drum or music, and can be followed just as if the user were hearing someone call out their name. When the user arrives near one audio waypoint, they hear a ‘ding’ sound, followed by the sound of the next waypoint. “It’s like a trail of breadcrumbs leading you along,” Hugo says. The app combines these audio augmented reality and spatial audio features with computer vision and other advanced tech to pinpoint where the user is in the station and get them where they want to go.

The dream team

“I wanted to do something that had meaning,” Hugo says of how his startup journey began. With a background in medical augmented reality and computer vision, Hugo now leads an interdisciplinary team that brings diverse expertise in everything from computer science to medical physics. His experience in augmented reality, and a passion for music and audio, eventually led to conversations with blind and visually impaired people about how they navigated in their everyday lives in order to build something that actually met their needs.

“For me this was a discovery about how difficult their life really is. It is much more difficult than people generally imagine.” For some blind and visually impaired people, Hugo found that even if they were capable of getting where they need to be, the whole process of memorising and trying to follow a route without making a single mistake could be so exhausting they would be left with no choice but to grab a taxi, or head back home. Those conversations left a mark on Hugo, motivating him to find a new solution. “I feel these people are superheros. They really make such a huge effort. And it comes with a cost,” Hugo says. “I know several blind and visually impaired people who suffered burnout at some point because they led regular lives, they had jobs, they even travelled alone. But they reached a certain age and they just burnt out completely,” he says.

Innovation, underground

Now Dreamwaves has turned one station of the metro in the Austrian capital Vienna into a living lab for the waveOut app. Traditionally, blind and visually impaired people would navigate somewhere like a metro station by using a cane and following raised lines on the ground. This can be a challenge when at intersections (do you turn left or right?) or making sure you don’t take the wrong escalator. “It takes a lot of memorisation and any slight mistake can lead you in the complete opposite direction,” Hugo says. “If a blind person has never been to a station before, there is no way for them to know what they should do.”

Some standard solutions for using tech to guide blind and visually impaired people include placing Bluetooth transponders around an area and using them to find the user’s position. However, this method can require costly installation and maintenance, harming its potential scalability. There is also the challenge of precisely pinpointing where the user is; no mean feat when the user is deep underground in a metro station where GPS might struggle.

Dreamwaves has got around these hurdles thanks to computer vision, which paired with the phone’s camera (users can use a lanyard to hold the phone securely on their chest, freeing up both hands) allows the app to know where the user is with centimetre precision. “We map out the station in 3D by going around taking images of the station and the phone is then localised within that map by correlating what the phone camera sees now with what you previously acquired,” Hugo explains. Unlike other methods, the station does not have to install or maintain any equipment, making it less costly.

Even if the user’s camera is obscured by rush hour crowds, the app can still provide accurate guidance thanks to a common computer vision process called Visual-Inertial Odometry. This analyses images from the user’s camera to estimate how they are moving through the space, allowing the app to calculate their current location based on where it had last located them.

Removing barriers, unlocking benefits

With the support of EIT Urban Mobility, Hugo’s team has been able to accelerate the startup’s progress and reach new milestones in its development. Early reactions from test users of the app were encouraging. “Could you do this with it? Could you do that?” Hugo recalls one blind user full of suggestions after a trial session. “Normally in my experience people say this when they like the concept,” he says.

Hugo sees several major impacts for waveOut users. “Lack of mobility means the large majority of [blind] people just stay home, they only leave home with someone, so they can feel really isolated and this has bad consequences on your mental health,” he says. That lack of movement impacts physical health, so while some blind and visually impaired people keep fit with exercise equipment at home, they are thought to represent a tiny percentage. Empowering people to become more mobile outside their homes can open up the path to better physical health for more people.

Removing barriers to urban mobility can also open up new opportunities, particularly when it comes to employment. The challenge is stark: the average unemployment rate is over 75% for blind and visually impaired people of working age in Europe, with more women unemployed than men, according to the NGO The European Blind Union. It’s here, on employment, where Hugo believes Dreamwaves could have considerable impact. “Mobility can be essential to get a job,” Hugo says. “If you feel that every day is hard, if you even give up sometimes trying to get to the doctor, which is something essential, then it’s very hard to get a job.”

Through more inclusive urban mobility, financial independence, along with better mental and physical health, starts to become possible for more people. All of that in turn can make cities more inclusive, and help blind and visually impaired people become more integrated into society. Then there’s straightforward safety. The audio-first app means users can follow its directions wherever they are without being distracted by their device’s screen.

Future prospects

“When you read any book about startups they always talk about the ups and downs, and one of the things I really learned is that they are real, not just in a book,” Hugo says. “There are moments where you feel this is just too difficult, and I think part of the game is to realise that this is normal.”

Hugo’s perseverance has paid off, and has seen Dreamwaves pick up honours including first prize in the Social Innovation Tournament of the European Investment Bank Institute in 2022. He sees waveOut potentially one day being available in any space thanks to the ease of 3D mapping. “The challenge is really adoption,” he says. Additionally, Dreamwaves is part of EIT Urban Mobility’s Investment Portfolio, aimed to support impact-oriented start-ups in the mobility sphere.

While testing is ongoing in Vienna, Dreamwaves is working on making waveOut more accurate and effective. By using a machine learning intensive method based purely on floor plans, Dreamwaves expects it can reduce the app’s dependency on 3D floor plans which require more visual references.

So what is the future of urban mobility? “Sustainability,” says Hugo, who feels that for too long cities have been designed around cars, and who believes that bike riders will be the next big group that will benefit from audio navigation. “I think that is the dream for urban mobility: that you can breathe, that you can feel that the space is public.”