JJ is back with some sad news about his AI driven co-star. But do not fret too much as he has some other AI powers up his sleeve with another CSUNATC24 interview. Also, as we are reaching the end of our California coverage, drop us a line about what you thought were the big takeaways from ATIA and CSUN. Send your ideas to feedback@blindbargains.com and we may feature those comments in a future episode.
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CSUNATC24 Interview: Amos Miller of Glidance
We have discussed various mobility enhancements for years on the podcast. However, it looks like we may now have the real deal on the horizon from the person behind Microsoft Soundscape. Amos Miller, CEO of Glidance, spoke to JJ from the Exhibit Hall floor about the new mobility aid. This device aims to be the first in what Amos calls intelligent Guides that can assist the existing skills of a cane or Service Animal user. The device utilizes a series of cameras, radar and on device chips to process travel faster than reliance on a current day cell phone. This speed of calculation allows the user to navigate and compensate quicker in challenging environments. Tune in, or read the transcript, to learn how Amos feels about how Glidance can work alongside various navigation apps to provide even greater flexibility when it comes to orientation and mobility. Pre-orders for Glidance are planned for the Spring of 2024 with a possible launch window in early 2025. To learn more, and hear a described video about the unit, visit the official Glidance website.
Transcript
We strive to provide an accurate transcription, though errors may occur.
Hide transcriptJ.J. Meddaugh: Hey, how's it going? Blind Bargains 227 as we cruise through interviews from CSUN 2024. I'm J.J., and I'm sad to share the news that my co-host Gigi has left us for future opportunities and we do wish her the very best of success and luck. She was such a great asset to have on the podcast over the past, two episodes. Meanwhile, Joe tells me he's running some wires that connect to other things that connect to other things. We'll keep checking in on that from time to time, but until all that happens, we have another interview from CSUN 2024. As I mentioned this time, it's about a new mobility aid. Yeah, I know you're scratching your head. Oh, here we go again. Another smart cane. If there ever was a person that could take the concept of a smart navigation aid and make it into something that might actually be useful, it might be Amos Miller. Amos Miller is a name that we became very familiar with as he worked to lead the team that developed the Microsoft Soundscapes app. For many years, this was a free app on the iOS platform that you could use to navigate using virtual immersive audio. It's a really cool app and now there are open source versions of that. So the Soundscapes app lives on. Amos left Microsoft at the beginning of 2023 and started a company called Glidance. Glidance is aiming to redefine navigation through a new mobility aid. I am not great at describing these types of things. So you'll just hear from him in just a little bit as we get to the interview from CSUN 2024. I wanted to mention, by the way, now that we're back in a couple episodes, that we want to hear from you and we want to know what you want us to talk about. So the email address is still the same. Feedback@blindbargains.com, F-E-E-D-B-A-C-K at blindbargains.com. Let us know what you'd like to hear, whether it's interviews, whether it's other content. We will do our best to reply to you and who knows, your idea might make it on a future episode. My interview with Amos Miller coming up in just a minute on Blind Bargains 227.
JM: Many of our podcast interviews are being recorded using new accessible voice recorders from Zoom. Zoom has released three new Essential voice recorders, the H1, H4, and H6Essential, all providing unparalleled audio quality and accessible features like a voice guide that helps you know what menu option you are on when you're moving through the menus. They're available now at ATGuys.com, ranging from the simple but powerful H1Essential for $99 up to the H6Essential for $299, which has the capability of recording up to six tracks at once. We love them. I used them for our podcast out in CSUN in Anaheim in 2024, and we think you will as well. Again, you can go to ATGuys.com to learn more about the Zoom accessible voice recorders or call 269-216-4798.
[interview sounder]
JM: We are here at CSUN 2024, the Exhibit Hall. I have found Amos Miller, the CEO of Glidance. There's been a lot of buzz and I was trying to come up with a cool glide pun, but I can't think of one. But Glidance is a really interesting and intriguing mobility aid that's here at CSUN. Welcome to the podcast.
Amos Miller: Thank you, JJ. It's a pleasure to be here and I'm really excited to hear Blind Bargains coming together again. I'm glad to be here.
JM: Thank you. Glad to be back for sure. So I had a chance to play with this thing a minute ago. It's a really interesting take on a navigation aid. So why don't you go ahead and describe a little more about it?
AM: All right. Well, the top line is that Glidance is a new mobility aid. It is in every sense of the term. We are thinking of it as a mobility aid alongside the cane and the guide dog. And really what we're doing here is using self-guiding technology to provide physical guidance to be a blind individual using the mobility aid. And the way that it works is glide has a, it's basically a long handle that rests on two wheels on the ground. You hold the handle, bring it to position similar to where you'd have the guide dog harness and then you start walking. You nudge it forward and you simply walk and glide uses its cameras and sensors and AI capabilities, self-driving capabilities to detect a safe path and really guide you along the way, avoiding obstacles, keeping you on a safe path, helping you to get to destinations and so forth.
JM: I almost felt like I was vacuuming. I'm sure you've heard that or mopping when I was grabbing onto the handle. Why don't we describe for people the physical design that you currently have? I know this is still a prototype.
AM: Yeah, we're in prototype 3. This is the prototype that we displayed at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. And since then we've updated the prototype quite a lot with some new autonomous capabilities that we're showing at the show today. Basically, the way it looks, it's quite difficult to really describe it, but think about it as a small, what should we call it? I'm trying to think of something of that size.
JM: Well, that's why I kind of went to vacuum, right? So you have a handle that's retractable.
AM: We have the handle. The handle is telescopic. The pole is about an inch and a half in diameter. So it's a pretty substantial pole. It's not like thin like a cane.
JM: Yep.
AM: So it's very firm. It goes at the 45-degree angle to the ground or to the base unit. The base unit is about 8 inches wide. And on the two sides are wheels. The wheels are currently 5.6 inches, but in our next version they will be 7 inches. So a good tread, a good size wheel so that they can work indoors and outdoors. And really all the smarts is in between the wheels. There's all the sophistication. There are radars and sensors in the front of the device at the sort of lower part of the device and a camera next to the handle so that the camera gets a good wide view of the scene in front. And the radars keep you safe from obstacles, down curbs, everything else. And using all that information, Glide, like I said earlier, detects a safe path to guide you on and guides you there. So the wheels are not powered. As you tried it, JJ, you pushed the device forward. It wasn't pulling you around. It wasn't dictating anything. You know, you could walk forward, back. You could walk fast or slow. It's entirely under your control. Right? And based on that movement, then Glide says, okay, you are moving forward. Let me figure out a path to take you on.
JM: So if you know
AM: And then it starts to steer the wheels.
JM: Sorry about that. If you know, I was informed, like say if I wanted to turn right, then you can kind of gesture, like you would maybe give a command to a dog, but obviously non-verbal, so you do a gesture to the handle, essentially.
AM: You basically twist the handle. You can do it in two ways. One is that you can twist the handle like a steering wheel and basically tell Glide, I want to turn right. And then what Glide will do is it will shoreline along the wall on the right until it opens up and then it will take the turn. Yeah, and you can also do that simply by kind of moving the handle to the left. So you're basically turning the device to the right a little bit. And so there's different ways of doing it.
JM: So it seems like there's a couple of different modes that you envision. There's the one that we just described where I'm just going to tell it, I have an idea where I want to go. I just want you to find me a clear path, turning right, turning left, etc. And then you're also looking at possible navigation where I could say, I want to find the Starbucks. Can you find me a path to get there?
AM: Exactly right. Yeah, I generally I use the term freestyle or directed. So freestyle, I know where I'm going. Just keep me safe, but it's smarter than that. So it keeps you safe, avoids obstacles, but it can also detect line-of-sight targets like a door, like a chair, like a down curb, so that you walking around you are fully in control freestyling, but it's giving you information, guiding you, keeping you safe. The directed mode is when you give it a destination. It's taking you there. And in that mode, there's really two broad ways to think about it. One is the way you train glides in an environment on specific routes that you want to learn, that you want to take, and the other is using maps. So think about, for example, if your job location has changed. You move to a new building and now you have to learn the new routes in that new building, from the reception desk to your cubicle, to the bathroom, but this building may not be mapped. So you can work with someone, you know, 20 minutes, glide all those routes and now glide knows all of those routes and you can now be back on your feet and do those routes and start to learn them yourself and then build up the autonomy and go back to freestyle when you're ready. Yeah, so really getting somebody who's not necessarily so confident with their orientation and navigation skills, getting them back on their feet quickly. And that's a really important point that we'll come back to in a moment.
JM: Yeah,
AM: yeah. And obviously the other one is where you actually set a destination and it guides you there.
JM: And of course, right, that's going to depend, especially indoors where there aren't a lot of indoor mapping tools available yet, you know, somewhere like this Marriott there is, thanks to good maps. And then that they end up setting up in a format that you and others can access, but indoor is still a thing that most places don't have yet, but it's coming.
AM: Yeah, for sure. And one of the things that glide has that a lot of other solution doesn't have is it has its cameras. It has really good IMUs built in. It has odometry in the wheels so we can detect every millimeter of movement of each wheel. So glide has a lot of capabilities that you wouldn't get say with a cell phone to be able to track your movement indoors get like, for example, if you walk into a building and you get that location at the entrance of the building and now you can walk different corridors and it can basically keep you on the map just because it can see everything around you and it can measure every millimeter of movement. Yeah, so we expect glide to really take the indoor navigation forward and also provide that information to other apps. Yeah, I like I don't plan to build a navigation app for glide. I want glide to be a great mobility aid that works with other people's navigation apps.
JM: No reason to recreate the wheel or the path, I guess, if you will, right?
AM: No, I think what the need here is for a really reliable, well-designed, solid mobility aid that can work with and integrate with other navigation apps, whether it's Google Maps, whether it's the WeWalk app, whether it's Soundscape or it could be Moov-It, right? It could be Aira, you know, all of these are form of navigation apps that help people in different scenarios. And I what I'd like to see is that now there's a mobility aid that these apps can work with.
JM: So it seems like you are targeting a lot of people who a maybe don't have as much confidence with mobility, but also it seems like a lot of your design is coming from working with guide dogs and service animals. Do you think this is going to be easier to pick up for someone who was a guide dog owner or do you think cane users can adapt just as much?
AM: So we've been running a lot of demos and user studies and have exposed the device to people all along their mobility journey and different backgrounds. Some people who have not trained at all with a cane or guide dog, people who have used guide dogs all their lives, people who use canes. It's definitely, you can see that guide dog owners, you know, people who have used guide dog before, it's very natural for them to move with a handle, but it really only takes about five minutes for somebody who hasn't used a guide dog before to get the hang of it. Now, obviously, there's always improvements that people can make, but people pick it up very, very quickly. And I think that's an important part because you don't need to, if somebody loses their sight later in life and they're just at the start of their mobility journey, one of the things that a device like Glide can do is get them back on their feet quicker, even before they learn all the necessary cane technique. So I think a device like this opens new opportunities for us to think about the orientation, skill acquisition and process that people go through. And we have to remember that still the great majority of people with sight loss, especially those who lose their sight, don't build advanced cane skills very quickly, if ever.
JM: Sure, that makes sense. So they're just learning just enough to get by or maybe have really poor cane technique.
AM: And yeah, I don't know what you think, J.J. I mean, feel free to add your opinions here, but devices like this are coming and they will get better over time and we will have intelligent guides that if you imagine this city street in 10 years, there'll be many, many more people with sight loss out and about. Some of them will be using canes. Some of them will be using dogs, but I think a lot of them will be using intelligent guides as well. And I say many more people because it's all the people who are not walking in the streets today or at least not independently. They don't have the confidence to do it. They don't have the confidence. They don't have the skills. They don't have sometimes the ability. And so that's the future we're working to. And I think Glide is sort of starting our journey in that way. And it's going to be an interesting learning process for all of us in the community.
JM: Well, I almost could see this also being a complement to a cane. I was envisioning a scenario as I was doing the demo where if I was walking to a destination, I would take this with me to walk. And then maybe if I got into the room or a smaller building, I would park it almost like you would lock up a bike. You get a bike lock and you put it up in the corner and then, you know, pull out a folding cane, right?
AM: Yeah, absolutely.
JM: In the smaller spaces.
AM: And even, I mean, I've been walking around the halls of CSUN with it and sometimes I'll have my cane in my other hand. First of all, to still symbolize that I'm blind here, like people are not familiar with Glide yet.
JM: That's a good point.
AM: To indicate that I'm a blind person. So having the cane in my other hand kind of helps with that. And sometimes I want to poke around a little bit and see, okay, why did Glide just do that? Yeah, why did we go around this corner? Oh, there's something going on here. Yesterday, can I tell a little story? Yesterday, we turned on the chair detection capability. So I started walking around and it starts to buzz and tell me tracking chair, tracking chair, when it spots a chair in the view.
JM: Yeah.
AM: And initially I was trying to avoid those chairs so that I can stay in the middle of the corridor. But then I thought, okay, I'll see who's sitting on that chair. So I walk along and it brings me to a person and I say, hello. And I say, tell me what you're working on. And, you know, so I start a conversation and I move to the next chair. That was a lot of fun. You know, something I didn't quite expect to happen.
JM: Glidance as a networking tool. There you go. So it's telling you this. I don't think we mentioned this. You have speakers that are built into, is it near the base of the unit? And then you also can connect via headset.
AM: The speakers are on the handle. Okay. So they're as close as we can get them to you. They're pointing upwards so that you should be able to hear it if it's quiet enough, but you can also plug a headset into it or connect it with Bluetooth. So yes, there's sound, there's voice. But I want to emphasize also, J.J., that I consider the voice to be kind of a secondary part of it. Like it's additional information. It's useful information, but the main function of steering is the wheels, right?
JM: Right.
AM: The haptics in the handle
JM: yup
AM: is important because it tells you slow down, speed up, sharp turn coming, big obstacle on the right. You get haptics for all of that. And then the voice and the sound are additional information. But, you know, it's really important to get that sound right. You know, I spent many years working on Soundscape. So I kind of learned a lot, I guess, on where and when we can use sound and where we should be very careful. Yeah. Sound is a secondary input.
JM: Sure. And it seems like, too, with the wheels, so I asked for a right turn and it does seem like the wheels have quite a bit of motion because it didn't do a gradual right. It was able to do a pretty hard right 90 degrees.
AM: Well, you can set it. I mean, you can not set it. I mean, it will go as sharp as it needs to, right? If you're walking along and there's just somebody three meters in front of you, you will probably not even notice the turn that Glide is making because it just gently guides you around the person. Right.
JM: Yeah.
AM: But if somebody all of a sudden jump in front of you, then it needs to take a sharp turn to get you out of the way. Right. So it really is depending on the situation.
JM: How reactive is the camera to catch something like that?
AM: Instantaneous. It recalculates ten times per second.
JM: Okay.
AM: And gets it to the wheels. Like, you know, that's one of the benefits that we have when we build it ourselves, that we are not reliant on the what the phone can do and the speeds that you can work at and so on. So it's instantaneous
JM: and perhaps an advantage over the smart canes of 5, 10, 20 years ago, which could see only five feet in front of you and not be very reactive.
AM: Yeah. No, this is extremely reactive, responsive rather. Yeah. And we also combine multiple sensors for redundancy. So the radars that they use at the bottom of the device, they provide less detail, but they're extremely reliable and they can work in all lighting conditions and weather conditions. Yeah. So if the camera struggles to see something, we have the radars to support that as well. Yeah. So it's really a combination to really provide that redundancy and that very reliable and responsive experience.
JM: So you mentioned all terrains. Have you done testing in heavy rain or snow or things like that yet?
AM: I'm not making claims on snow just yet. I know that snow is an important factor. There's two things to work on on snow and we are working on them. One is just the steering, right? Having wheels that will work on snow and steer.
JM: Yeah.
AM: Yeah. And towards that, we are looking at different options. But one of the ideas that we're looking at is that you could maybe change wheels if you are going out on the snow today.
AM: Like you change your car tires in the winter to four-wheel drive.
AM: You can snap on a different pair of wheels for this journey or a different set of wheels that you'd use in the summer or indoors so that you get something that works really well in snow. So that's the mechanical side of the question. The other one is the navigation side of the question, right? To what extent the camera and the sensors and the whole system can keep you on a sidewalk that is covered in snow and the line between the sidewalk and the road is gone. Yeah. Right. And the way we look at that is that Glide will get better over time and be able to deal with more and more complex situation. And we're basically thinking about it in the Tesla model where you have a device that has all the electronics and capability and you'll get over-the-air updates and learned models that can deal with more and more complex situations such as snow. Rain, I'm less worried about.
JM: There's going to be times, whether it's snow or maybe stairs, where you're just going to have to lift the thing and carry it because there's a snowbank. You have to climb over it or there's a bunch of stairs coming up. How will it alert you, first of all, of something like stairs to make sure that you're going to have to stop before and pick it up? Is that done through the haptics? And what about situations where it can't find a path at all?
AM: Yeah. So stairs, if it's stationary stairs, not escalators, it will guide you to the bottom of the stairs. It'll tell you that it's stairs and it'll try to get you as close as it can to a rail. Okay. And so when you approach the stairs, it will give you a haptic on the handle to slow down. And then when you reach the bottom stairs, it will apply the brakes. Okay. And at that point, you can move to a vertical position with glide and you can reach out your hand forward, find the rail, pick it up and walk up the stairs. And if you're going down the stairs, it'll be the same thing. You don't need to pick it up if you're going down because you can actually roll it down if you prefer.
JM: Really.
AM: Although it might be easier for you to pick it up, like it might be quicker to just pick it up and walk down the stairs.
JM: So it's haptics that's going to alert you on the stairs, like different vibration patterns?
AM: All of that we're going to figure out in the coming year as we kind of refine the experience. Haptics, it will definitely warn you that it's about to stop. You can, you have a distinct haptic symbol to tell you that it's stairs. Like we're talking with Haben yesterday, the lady who's deafblind, and she was really interested in the haptic language and how the haptic language can provide additional information about what's around, what you're encountering and so on. On the other hand, we know that haptics can also be quite confusing. Yeah. So I think we need to find the right path with haptic symbols. And if you have your hearing, then voice might be an easier way to communicate that it's stairs or something of that nature.
JM: Right. Probably going to ultimately be a combination of both.
AM: Yeah.
JM: How heavy is this?
AM: At the moment, it's eight pounds, but we're working to a five pound weight when the device ships.
JM: All right. Well, since you just mentioned it, when will the device ship? It sounds like you have a bit of testing to go. These are prototypes here at CSUN. What's your timeline? What are you looking at over the next year?
AM: So you didn't ask the price question either, so I can address both.
JM: Oh, I was getting there, but go for it.
AM: No, they kind of come together. So first of all, our goal with Glide, we'll just talk of the price for a moment. Our goal with Glide is to really focus on building a consumer device that most people should be able to afford to buy. So the pricing model is along the lines of what it costs to own a cell phone. We haven't sort of finalized the pricing, but it kind of gives you a range of how we're thinking about it in terms of you purchase a device, you may have a service pack that comes with it that gives you more advanced features if you are kind of an advanced user that needs a lot from the device as compared to a beginner who really at this stage just needs to get confident on two routes around their home. Yeah, so kind of different options. But the pricing range is, you know, most people can manage with a phone, and we believe that's a pricing level that will enable most people to get it before we need to rely on reimbursements. But of course, reimbursements are going to be important. In terms of the timeframe, so we're going to be opening the site for pre-orders in this spring. We'll be getting to betas later in the year and look to start shipping pre-order device in the first half of 2025. That's currently the timeframe that we're working to. But basically, I encourage people to come to Glidance.io, our website, G-L-I-D-A-N-C-E dot I-O, Glidance.io, to sign up so that, A, people get informed about the pre-orders and also about the progress that we're making. We're also hosting Zoom calls, Zoom meetings once a month that we invite people who signed up to join and hear updates, share their questions, share their concerns, and really engage with the community. And that's been extremely successful, and we invite people to join that. And that really will be the channel that we're able to keep engaging the community as we kind of get through the year and hopefully get the device out to people's hands next year.
JM: Perfect. And if people are doing a pre-order, is that going to be some sort of a deposit that you would put down, or are you still working that detail out?
AM: It will be a highly discounted price. Okay. And so that kind of ties back to the pricing. But when we start the pre-order program, we will be more specific about the pricing as well.
JM: Perfect. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
AM: J.J., it's a real pleasure. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about Glide. Thank you for coming to try it out, and I'm looking forward to continuing the conversation.
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Joe Steinkamp is no stranger to the world of technology, having been a user of video magnification and blindness related electronic devices since 1979. Joe has worked in radio, retail management and Vocational Rehabilitation for blind and low vision individuals in Texas. He has been writing about the A.T. Industry for 15 years and podcasting about it for almost a decade.
