Mainebiz, WVII report on new app by Giudice, postdoctoral researcher
Mainebiz and WVII (Channel 7) reported Nicholas Giudice, a professor of spatial informatics and the director of the Virtual Environment and Multimodal Interaction (VEMI) Laboratory at the University of Maine, and Hari Prasath Palani, a postdoctoral researcher in spatial informatics at UMaine, have released the first app through their startup company. Last October, Giudice and Palani founded UNAR Labs LLC, a company that helps visually impaired people access graphical information in digital media through portable devices, and the company just released the app Tic Tac Toe on iTunes. The app’s development is funded by a $748,000 National Science Foundation grant, WVII reports. The pair has been researching ways to “bridge the information gap between sighted and visually impaired people,” according to Mainebiz. They developed the app after realizing there were no mobile game apps for visually impaired people. Tic Tac Toe is designed for both visually impaired and sighted people, and the app is run on an artificial intelligence platform named Midlina after a bridge in Iceland linking two continents “just like how we are working to connect the visual with non-visual parts of the world,” Palani said. Midlina also is used for educational and navigational purposes. Tic Tac Toe players can use a setting for real-time audio narration and find the lines of the game grid using vibrations in this version of the classic game. The game is the first of many that UNAR Labs plans to make to fulfill its mission to “make digital information accessible beyond sensory bounds,” the article states. UNAR Labs is working to reverse trends — among visually impaired people in the United States, 70 percent are unemployed or underemployed, 80 percent do not travel independently, only 11 percent have a college degree and 33 percent finish high school, according to the company’s statistics cited by Mainebiz. “This is just the beginning of our mission towards creating a truly inclusive and accessible digital world. We are not stopping here, watch out for us!” said Palani. “I think it’ll really make a huge difference especially for STEM learning disciplines for a lot of students,” Giudice told WVII. “And that’s really exciting. Because virtual reality is generally synonymous with visual reality. And we’re really trying to make virtual reality to be really modeling all the senses that we use.”