Hello to our readers! Welcome back, and we hope your week has been going well!

This week, Team Wayfinder has been working hard on our prototype, and although things are still very basic, we are proud to have been able to add some key functionalities to our blind user scene in Unity! Some new implementations are the core navigation menu that the user will be interacting with, as well as an updating list of objects that are surrounding the user within a certain radius. By using specific buttons, the user can navigate through the list and select an object to move towards, step by step. Once the user as reached the object chosen, they will be notified of their arrival.

Another important update: with help from the Disability Resource Center and Disability Ambassadors at UF, Team Wayfinder is finally able to speak with and gain some valuable insight from several blind or visually students on campus! We hope to learn lots from them and continue to work with any interested students throughout the semester.

For next week, the team hopes to be able to integrate a working Text-to-Speech system within the scene and continue to resolve issues that have been noted in the Github; some of these include bugs with the updating object list, tweaking the filtering/naming of the objects in the list, and adding some anchor points for improved user navigation. In addition, we aim to continue interviewing students who have been scheduled for next week, so stay tuned for any updates!

Hello everyone!

It is finally time for PDR presentations! This week, Team Wayfinder delivered a successful PDR presentation to our team coach and liaison, and received valuable feedback toward our project to implement and improve upon. The team was also able present the completed Unity 3D scene for sighted user use, which includes basic user tasks that will be used in testing and that is engaging for the sighted user, and our requirements document that will help guide the team for the rest of the semester.

The team plans for the upcoming week to begin development on the navigation menu and the various mechanisms that will be used for blind user use, laying out specific tasks for the team in JIRA for the next two weeks and necessary user stories and details.

This week, we had our Preliminary Design Review (PDR) presentations during class and presented it to our peers for commentary and evaluation. This is the first draft of our PDR, so with the feedback that we receive from our peers and coach, we hope to be able to improve and work on it for our final PDR presentation to our liaison next week.

The 3D Unity environment and the Github repository has also been set up this week and the team has begun development on the scene and user tasks for our first initial prototype. The team aims to continue development and adding navigation mechanics for blind users once the main scene and objects have been added for the user tasks that will be performed during testing.

Finally, the team had the pleasure to meet our liaison in person for our weekly meeting and have a dinner together downtown! Below is a picture of our whole team, including our coach Ronnie, and our liaison Sriram. Through the meeting, we were able to narrow down our scope even further and plan to create a document that includes specifically the needs and requirements of user needs and the prototype for the following week.