Dreamwaves’ waveIn

This project focused on improving the accessibility of indoor public transport solutions for blind and visually impaired people.

The waveIn solution, developed by Dreamwaves, is a hands-free intuitive audio augmented reality app for indoor navigation. Dreamwaves places virtual waypoints in the real world and uses spatial audio to perceive the waypoints and directions in realistic way. The user can find their way simply by listening and following the sounds. The solution uses computer vision based indoor localisation method which can measure the position and the orientation of a smartphone device in an indoor space with high accuracy. Knowing the position and orientation of the user is crucial for creating spatially meaningful waypoints for the user to follow.

Dreamwaves achieves precise user positioning by generating a 3D map of the indoor space with a standard smartphone, mapping 20,000 square meters in under an hour. Real-time localisation, with sub-20cm accuracy, is achieved using the smartphone’s camera. Dreamwaves’ in-house technology features a high-resolution engine, offering one-degree precision audio rendering in all directions, without interpolation. It’s highly efficient, consuming minimal smartphone resources and presents the user with a realistically sounding virtual sound source. Using this engine, the users have the feeling that a music is emerging from the virtual waypoints and can walk in the direction of the music.

In conjunction with Wiener Linien, Vienna’s public transport authority, Dreamwaves piloted the waveIn solution by mapping and equipping five large public transport stations and tested the solution with blind and visually impaired users.