Led by our blind colleagues, we develop bleeding edge technologies to solve the hard problems experienced by those living with vision disability. To do this, we work with a lot of smart and mission-driven people to get the job done.
We’re open to try out new ideas and technologies, and when we can find something we need, we go build it. ARIA invests in developing new and emerging technologies that support our mission.
We support over 20 researchers from leading universities including UTS, University of Sydney working on novel solutions involving high realtime low power approaches to SLAM, sensor systems like MEMS lidar, millimeter wave radar, event cameras, and novel approaches to high bandwidth very low power processing including novel ASIC designs, neuromorphic processing, geometric computation, and high efficiency device based generative AI.
Cooperative Research Centres Projects
(CRC-P)
While we lean toward the practical, the intuitive, and rapid & scrappy idea validation, much of what we do is tied with human perception and human experience, which rarely lends itself to clean experimentation and statistical power when trying to fine tune a system, or to tease out a subtle problem without breaking said problem though reductive experimentation. Reality, and the humans in it, are complex. ARIA’s benefit is accurate and effective augmented perception in the middle of all that complexity; and at the end of the day, ARIA is being developed as a medical device, so devising the appropriate trials and consistent data collection is a must.
A huge challenge is effectively simulating reality - which is super hard; and measuring people inside such a simulation is equally hard. This is where the HAL (Human Augmentation Lab) comes in. A fair description of it is a "poor man's" version of Star Trek's Holodeck, coupled with high precision physical, bio and neuro state tracking. With this set-up, we can create repeatable experiments, and capture a ground truth baseline to which we can measure ARIA’s performance and the performance of people in the experiment. This allows us to make incremental and quantifiable improvements to the technology.
Some of the equipment at the HAL includes 36 motion tracking cameras, a state of the art 64 channel spatial audio simulator, lighting controls, EEG and EMG tracking, GSR, and Heart Rate tracking.
Development of precise sensory augmentation technology.
Be at the forefront of developing cutting-edge solutions ...
Development of precise sensory augmentation technology.
Be at the forefront of developing cutting-edge solutions ...
ARIA currently supports over 20 researchers through University of Technology Sydney, University of Sydney, and Swinburne University. These research collaborations focus on multidisciplinary research translation including spatial audio engine design, psychoacoustics, sensory augmentation and integration, cognitive workload monitoring and adaptation, neuroscience, ophthalmic clinical practice, orthoptic practice, orientation and mobility, health economics, and health data science, sensor simulation, high efficiency machine vision pipelines, vision classification, visual odometry SLAM, and novel high efficiency sensor and processing systems including including event cameras and neuromorphic processors.
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