Making Hybrid Senses: Assistive sensing technology for the visually impaired

Building on recent technological advances, the Making Hybrid Senses project (2025-2027) combines computer vision, haptics, new interfaces, and robotics to develop novel assistive technologies for visually impaired individuals.

Funded by the Villum Foundation, this project aims to create "hybrid senses." That is, rather than ‘simulating sight’ through technology, it combines sensory inputs with visually impaired persons’ existing practices and abilities to foster new (hybrid) ways of perceiving, navigating, and acting upon one’s environment.

The project adopts an ethnographic and research-through-design approach to exploring the ordinary expertise of visually impaired people. This dual approach aims to ensure that the prototyped assistive technologies offer meaningful solutions grounded in visually impaired users’ practices and activities, rather than troublesome fixes relevant only to the researchers themselves. In doing so, Making Hybrid Senses includes research participants and disability-led organisations in developing new understandings and innovations of assistive technologies, by centring on their expertise and embodied competence as they engage in their everyday activities.

Making Hybrid Senses is structured around two phases. The first involves an exploratory investigation into the experiences and practices of blind individuals in natural environments, to generate situated insights into their interactions with these settings. These insights, alongside other relevant findings, will then inform a subsequent phase focused on the experimental exploration and development of novel robotic and sensory technologies within controlled environments. This second phase will involve several ‘lead users’ based in Denmark motivated to contribute to the research. As part of our iterative ‘research-through-design’ approach, these participants will be actively engaged in developing and testing the prototypes.

In sum, rather than adopting a purely descriptive approach to the ordinary expertise of visually impaired individuals, Making Hybrid Senses aims to leverage a granular understanding of their sensory resources to develop assistive technologies directly relevant to their activities. These prototypes will enable understanding what senses can be constructed through new technologies and how action and sensing can be connected in tight sensory loops with technology.