Phil Bartie, an MSc student at the School of GeoSciences at Edinburgh University have come up with an innovation that allows tourists to listen to an audio guide telling them about wherever they happen to be.

Based on a laptop computer -to be carried in a rucksack, it holds a digitised data view of the city, and as the user moves around the streets the GPS monitors the route and relays this information via satellite to the computer which can then describe, via a voice interface, the various places of interest which the user is seeing.

Still in its design stage, the “Edinburgh Augmented Reality System” was tested in Chambers Street, Edinburgh. As the user stood at the bottom end of the street, the gadget clicked into action, describing the scene with Old College on the left and Adam House straight ahead. When the user walked up the street it said: “George Heriot School is just visible, directly in front of you at 560 metres.”

The invention could be used as a guide for the visually impaired. Instead of using a cane, they could be guided by audio.

From Scotsman.