In France, the Institut de la Vision inaugurated the Artificial Street on November 26, 2013. This is a research and development environment that supports the creation of technologies and treatments to assist people with impaired vision.
The new platform, called STREETlab, resembles a basic commercial street. But it is in fact a forum for research and development available to researchers and the sector's manufacturers. It contains sophisticated equipment used to control the parameters of the environment lighting, ambient sound, decorative features and to quantitatively assess the improvement in living conditions of people who participate in the tests, for instance in mobility. Standardized tasks can be developed within an environment that reproduces various concrete situations.
The platform also monitors the behaviour of visually impaired people, using biometric sensors to analyze movement, eye trackers to analyze visual strategies, or infrared cameras to help follow and record experiences.
One of the first projects to use the Artificial Street focuses on motor ability and low vision. The objective is to identify optimal strategies for visual movement in patients with advanced retinitis pigmentosa in tasks such as locomotion or visual research.
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