WABI quotes Giudice in report on $748K NSF grant for VEMI Lab
WABI (Channel 5) reported the Virtual Environment and Multimodal Interaction Lab (VEMI Lab) at the University of Maine received a $748,000 National Science Foundation grant, and quoted Nicholas Giudice, a professor of spatial informatics at UMaine and director of the VEMI Lab. The funding will support continuing development of a first-of-its-kind learning platform to give blind or visually impaired students access to STEM-related graphics, the report states. The platform is being developed as a smartphone app with the goal of being ready for commercial use within five years. “My ultimate hope is that students that are in classrooms as their peers are looking at cell diagrams or looking at graphs or looking at maps, they’ll have their phone, they’ll be served up immediately where the professor or the teacher has on the PowerPoint right to their phone, and they’ll be learning it right as their peers are,” Giudice told WABI.