KLARA
CONCEPT | OPPO DESIGN COMPETITION
A head-mounted wearable to give the visually-impaired an intuitive sense of their surroundings through spatial audio.
Klara interprets your surroundings in 360° and uses spatial audio to help you interact with the world more safely and meaningfully.
Characteristics
Understanding how things might feel and behave around us.
Danger
Predict if an object or entity around you is a risk.
Wayfinding
Directions to get you to your destination or stroll for pleasure.
Context
Why the name “Klara”?
Technology
Context
working-age people in the UK with at-least partial visual impairment have collided with an obstacle outside in the last three months.
Why this happens:
- Limited Awareness with Traditional Tools — Walking sticks cannot fully capture the detailed spatial information needed for safe navigation in diverse settings, and are limited at sensing physical boundaries.
- Complex Environments — The increasing complexity of modern environments demands a more sophisticated approach to understanding environments.
- Lack of Blind-Friendly Infrastructure — Many urban public spaces lack features to support visually impaired individuals, such as tactile paving and audible signals at crosswalks.
Fundamentally, smart canes require walkers to “scan” the environment like a radar, because they only show what’s within a small area in front of them.
They rely on cues to warn walkers of possible collisions, but do not indicate the shape of the object.
Our eyes have evolved to excel at discerning material properties and predicting future scenarios from patterns based on appearance…
Since the Industrial Revolution we’ve been in a battle to eliminate noise, but before then we used sound as a tool for survival.
Why the name “Klara”?
Inspired by “Klara and the Sun”, Kazuo Ishiguro's book about a humanoid AI given to a sick girl by her mother to be her companion.
Klara, who sees the world through a seemingly-limited grid, has a mission to learn about the girl to make her happy, while protecting her from physical and emotional dangers.
Technology
HARDWARE
The device is made possible through OPPO's pioneering technologies:
- Depth-sensing via OPPOxAlpsenTek’ ALPIX-EIGER sensors (alternatively, Time-Of-Flight sensors, such as STMicroelectronics’ 90° vl53l7cx)
- Integrated environment modelling via the Snapdragon XR2+ chipset
- Spatial audio via head-tracking and HRTF in the Enco Air3 Pro earphones.
- Rapid charging via OPPO’s SUPERVOOC system.
SOFTWARE
ALPIX-EIGER sensors (alternatively, vl53l7cx Time-Of-Flight sensors) on Klara capture a point cloud of objects and surfaces in the surrounding area, in real-time.
Onboard processors model the space by transforming the point cloud into discrete objects, defining the size of the space and placing it in relation to the head-tracked orientation of the wearer.
The integrated Spatial Audio software generates audio with position and spatial width locked to objects in the model, and applying audio processing
to match the acoustic environment.