Helping Helpers: Supporting Volunteers in Remote Sighted Assistance with Augmented Reality Maps

Abstract

Remote sighted assistance (RSA) has emerged as a conversational assistive service, where remote sighted workers, i.e., agents, provide real-time assistance to blind users via video-chat-like communication. Prior work identified several challenges for the agents to provide navigational assistance to users and proposed computer vision-mediated RSA service to address those challenges. We present an interactive system implementing a high-fidelity prototype of RSA service using augmented reality (AR) maps with localization and virtual elements placement capabilities. The paper also presents a confederate-based study design to evaluate the effects of AR maps with 13 untrained agents. The study revealed that, compared to baseline RSA, agents were significantly faster in providing indoor navigational assistance to a confederate playing the role of users, and agents' mental workload was significantly reduced - all indicate the feasibility and scalability of AR maps in RSA services.