Guide dogs and 春雨直播app
Assistance dogs serve as the eyes, ears and limbs of the people they help. The Graduate School of Frontier Sciences is conducting leading research to help meet the challenges faced by visually impaired people and guide dogs, which are a type of assistance dog. In the following, we introduce the initiatives implemented by the Graduate School, working together with the , as part of the Social Cooperation Program launched to conduct studies into guide dogs. We also introduce research into guide dogs and people with visual impairments for which the Graduate School’s Laboratory of Sciences for Guide Dogs and Vision-Impaired Persons is serving as a hub. We interviewed three researchers specializing in genomics, virtual reality and information processing.
Read part 1 here:
Guide dogs and 春雨直播app (part 1)2.
Virtual experience of visual impairment and of walking with a guide dog
Tomohiro Amemiya
Professor,
What does it feel like to walk with a guide dog?
Events held to let people experience what it feels like to walk with a guide dog are organized across the country, but they are infrequent and occur in only a handful of locations. In response, Professor Tomohiro Amemiya, who is conducting research involving virtual reality (VR), has developed a prototype system that lets people virtually experience walking with a guide dog. Users of the system don special goggles and grip a handle to feel the movement of a virtual dog as it guides them to their destination.
The handle that the user grips is connected to a motor unit that was made by modifying a commercially available gaming device. Based on the current position of the handle, the unit pulls or pushes the handle according to the movements of the computer-generated dog. Just like a real guide dog, the virtual canine stops when it detects a risk, and pulls the user forward to cross a street. To prevent VR sickness, the hands-on experience lasts only around two minutes. In the future, Professor Amemiya wants to install the system at guide dog training centers and other such facilities.
Professor Amemiya also engaged in the development of goggles designed to provide a virtual experience of low vision. Although glasses that provide such an experience are already commercially available, they recreate only the most typical symptom, the inability to see objects in the central field of vision. In reality, however, symptoms of low vision can also include ordinary levels of light feeling too bright, a distorted view on only the left side and missing part of one’s field of vision.
The VR system using Professor Amemiya’s goggles enables users to have a customized experience of low vision that includes the various symptoms mentioned above. The way it works is an eye doctor and others collect information about various symptoms through interviews with patients. This information is transformed into graphic data using the brush tool of an authoring software called “VisionPainter.” The graphic data is then transmitted to the VR goggles. The camera mounted on the goggles captures images of the outside world, and the graphic data pertaining to a specific symptom of low vision is incorporated into the image to allow the user to experience the symptom. According to the professor, the graphic data created using the brush tool are stored in the computer like pictures on canvases, which can be utilized to check the progression of visual impairments.
“One of the benefits of using a VR system is that we can provide people with a more personal experience by adding effects of such symptoms to the images that the user is seeing,” explains Professor Amemiya. “It is easier to understand the impact of visual impairments on daily life when you virtually experience it with your own eyes than if you simply learn about visual impairments through educational materials. I think the VR system is very effective at providing people with this kind of hands-on experience.”
3.
Passing down the outstanding skills of professional guide dog trainers
Yasutoshi Makino
Associate Professor,
The training of guide dog candidates is essential to increase the number of dogs in service. Even puppies that are good candidates need considerable professional training before they can become working animals. Associate Professor Yasutoshi Makino, who researches haptics, is developing a system that gives users a hands-on experience of the skills demonstrated by experienced professional dog trainers, which is expected to be useful in the development of future trainers.
When Associate Professor Makino visited the Japan Guide Dog Association to see how dogs are trained there, he was blown away by what one of the experienced trainers could do.
“It was incredible how the dogs reacted in a completely different manner to that trainer,” he reports. “For example, when the trainer gave a signal to dogs that were playing, every single dog, regardless of its character, immediately came to attention.”
Associate Professor Makino spoke with the trainer to find out about a special kind of tactic used in the training. The trainer would repeatedly push and then pull on the handle of the harness while monitoring the response of the dog, including whether or not it was furrowing its brow. But it is not easy to understand exactly how such training is performed through observation alone, nor it is easy for the trainers themselves to put it into words. According to the trainer, this makes it difficult for experienced trainers to pass down their skills to the next generation. Associate Professor Makino wanted to find a method of quantifying these skills to make it easier for new trainers to acquire them.
He has therefore been working to visualize data about the inclination of the handle and the force applied to it by experienced dog trainers. By accumulating such data, he hopes to build a device that will allow anyone to experience what it is like to train a guide dog.
“According to the trainers I spoke with, even those with advanced skills do not know exactly what the other experienced trainers are doing in terms of when they apply force to the handle and how strongly,” he said.
Associate Professor Makino concluded that a system for sharing such training data would therefore also help dog trainers study the best practices of their peers to increase the impact of their own training. In order to build such a system, he has been using a sensor-equipped dog harness to obtain measurement data about the inclination of the handle and the force applied to it when an experienced trainer makes a dog move forward or stop.
Utilizing the data he obtained, the associate professor also prototyped a system to reproduce the training provided by an experienced trainer. A motor unit installed at the base of two devices reproduces the inclination of the handle and the push/pull force applied to it. Going forward, Associate Professor Makino aims to also incorporate into the system images and video showing how dogs are trained to make the virtual experience even more realistic.
When training dogs, it is very important to keep them focused. The effect of training will not be proportional to the time spent if the dog is distracted. Based on this recognition, Associate Professor Makino sampled the skeletal data of dogs to determine the relationship between a dog’s posture and its degree of concentration. He found that the degree to which a dog is concentrating appears to be relatively related to the distance between the dog and its trainer and to the direction in which the dog’s nose is pointing. He says that this research is still underway.
In the training of guide dogs, human trainers and dogs communicate through touch. As a researcher who studies haptics, or interaction involving touch, Associate Professor Makino says that makes this research topic more interesting to him than any other. He thus intends to continue his research to help improve the quality of guide dog training.
