MuZIEum is a strange compound word - also in Dutch - a wordplay with museum and see (ZIE in Dutch)
MuZIEum = ZIE & Museum
- museum open your eyes -
It is the place where the IoT reading place will be tested and installed thanks to the great MuZIEum team and their open-minded approach to innovation.
A few words about the place and its initiative
(For more details please follow the official link: MuZIEum)
It is a museum and an interactive place but also a pretty nice event place.
The images below gives an idea of the impression I had when I met the project manager CARLIJN NIJHOF. MuZIEum offers to the visitors a comfortable area where they can experience the different reality perceived by visually impaired people.
During a long time our cultural heritage forced us to consider visually impaired people through a barrier, a sort of fence separating us and them in two different groups living in different worlds. MuZIEum provide an interactive experience to non visually impaired visitors helping them discovering how thin and meaningless this barrier is, as well as experiencing how extremely difficult is to move and interact in a world without light.
 {gallery} MuZIEum in Nijmegen, NL |
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The challenge in the challenge
Today, visually impaired people can use a variety of different tools that make their life easier; gone is the time of the Braille typewriters: new technologies offers text to voice devices, talkback features, smartphone apps able to identify objects pointed by a camera, walking cans equipped with sensors and ultrasound support for obstacle detection, voice controlled devices and many other tools that facilitate the interaction with reality. So how the IoT technologies can be helpful to empower these already existing disability supports?
The answer is what this project aims to reach, thanks to the cooperation and wide knowledge of the MuZIEum team I can count on. Visually impaired people can make their daily life easier thanks to some technological devices - most of them portable - In a nutshell, they manage tools for better interaction with the world around them.
The challenge is to create a series of IoT nodes performing two main tasks:
- Enable the autonomous environment adaptability: It is the environment that reacts by recognising the visually impaired subject and so avoiding them to use any special tools. The living context improve and specialise its ability to support the interaction with different kind of users.
- Illustrate and teach to non-visually impaired people: MuZIEum visitors can observe and experience by their own the environment adaption to reduce the gap through low impact interaction
The next step is to meet the MuZIEum team in order to design the on-site project architecture.
General guidelines
Some main guidelines have already been defined to design the most important aspects of the project:
- Wireless connected nodes: the IoT components will be easily adaptable to different environments without redefining the single component configuration
- Modular independent blocks: every component should be introduced in the asset without the need to change the already created design and configuration
- Self-identifying modules: every implemented IoT module should support one-button activation, self identifying itself on the network of already existing modules.
- Specialised modules: every IoT components has its own specialisation associated to a different form factor and colour easy to identify by both visually impaired and non-impaired users
One of the primary applicative goals of the project is to simplify the sharing of experiences between visually impaired and non-impaired users in close relations reducing the perceptive gap
Introducing the main components
Here are the main components and their usage planned to use building the nodes. The final building blocks will be defined further in a more structured schematic design. Note taht more components of the same type can be used in different nodes.
- Daylight POV camera - Face recognition, gesture recognition, imaging
- Infrared camera - No-light imaging, image processing, special images acquisition
- Audio output - Text speech, sound output, audio alerts
- Audio input - Voice sensing, voice recognition, audio message acquisition
- Ultrasound sensors - Presence and obstacle detection, components self-position, movement detection
- NFC / RFID - Recognise tagged elements, identify and exchange data packets with NFC equipped mobile devices
- IoT network gateway - Controller module managing the IoT modules network
- Multipoint Touch Screen - Synchronised visually impaired and non-impaired people interaction and experience sharing