BlindZA.com - Visit to a festive season exhibition using the vOICe

Visit to a festive season exhibition using the vOICe

This is a write-up relating to another form of sight-seeing (from the blind/visually-impaired perspective) I experienced a little while ago making use of the vOICe in December 2023 when we visited a local casino's Christmas market exhibition in the evening, which involved a form of open-air market, but, of more interest, some lighting displays, as well as quite a few bits of scenery they'd set up rendering more or less life-size renditions of various fairytales and other scenes relating to the Christmas traditions and scenery.

The android handset I made use of for this combination is a Cubot J10 'mini' android handset, with physical dimensions of approximately 13cm length, 6cm width, and 1.3cm thickness, which means it's small enough to wear strapped to the back of my left hand, turned around inside it's protective housing so that the main 5MP camera faces outwards, and I work with it paired with a single over-the-counter hearing aid via bluetooth since that means that when I pause receiving feedback from the vOICe, it reverts back to just passing through an amplified rendition of surrounding sounds.

Anyway, besides being with sighted folks, and using my normal white cane in my right hand, I took this combination along with me, and, used it for roundabout half-an-hour while we walked around the whole exhibition venue, using the vOICe on this mini android phone.

The idea with that setup - repeating myself again? - is that it lets me use a relatively cheap, smallish android handset, running the android version of the vOICe, and, since it's streaming audio output to a form of hearing aid, or audio amplifier using bluetooth, it means the android phone is simply strapped to the back of my one hand using a velcro-fastening nylon strap, to sort of keep it out-of-the-way, but, make it easy enough for me to aim the camera in any direction I want, while moving around, etc. etc. - not the fastest form of reaction time in terms of moving through large crowds of people, but, very convenient when I want to look at different parts of the scenery, and so on.

So, firstly, the sort of entrance to the whole thing was moving through a form of tunnel, where they seemed to have star-rendering patterns on the roof - as in, lots of small bright lights above our heads in different patterns, and, while can't say picked up too much in terms of any specific forms of constellations they might have tried to put in place, we were just walking through it, and, I definitely noticed what my sighted companions were talking about, and, noticed the end of the tunnel before we stepped out of it, when everything reverted back to what had been hearing before, and, shifted away from the noticeable pattern of a dark background with lots of little bright points in it.

Besides that, since wasn't planning to try too much in terms of actually moving through packed crowds of people shifting directions all the time in evening light, I mostly used it to check out, or look at the various scenes they'd put up, and, a couple of them especially stood out in terms of my interpretation of said scenes - yes, I had my sighted companions describing them to me most of the time, but, giving me vague descriptions until I'd had a chance to firstly review them myself.

For example, there was a scene of something like angels hovering above Bethlehem, with a sort of mirror ball hovering above the small building representing the manger, and, I could pick up spacing, some of the outlines of the angels' wings, and, the mirror ball was the most noticeable landmark in this scene, with lights shining on it from different aspects.

Then, there were a couple of collections of things like polar bears and igloo's standing around in something like the area around the north pole, and, while not too sure of lighting on this scene, and, while not really sure picked up too much about the renditions of polar bears - white-fur bear standing against a whitish background - while the igloos were also done in what should have counted as blocks of ice, they might have had a bit more decorative detail added on, since definitely picked up some of their dome-shaped outlines.

Lastly, for now, the one scene sort of of interest, and where think picked up the most detail in terms of my own interpretation of the layout, etc. was initially just described to me as Santa Claus, or father Christmas in his own cottage, and, the two main features picked up immediately were the fireplace on the left-hand side, and then Father Christmas himself standing on the opposite side of the space.

The nice thing here was that, for example, this was one of the scenes where got a true idea of sizing, perspective, etc., since took notice of the fireplace of my own accord - before asking people about it, and picked up the more or less horizontal height thereof, and, the fact that Father Christmas had been modeled roundabout the same height as myself, and, while won't say could recognise his figure in any distinctive outline, was still very nice to get an idea of the perspective of my position in front of the scene, and, follow the right direction of what my companions were talking about when they were discussing the details of parts thereof.

There were a couple of other scenes checked out - picking up locations of goblins/elves and fairies scattered around forms of woodland scenes, where could tell where the characters were in front of taller straight tree trunks, and, some other forms of livestock, etc. that could take note of the location of in their scenes, but, not going to go into too much detail here since, no, the lighting was not ideal from my perspective since it was meant to be more seasonal, or targeting making the sighted people around me take on the festive vibe from an exploratory perspective - hope that makes sense?

Now, no, the combination am making use of here is not going to be ideal in the rest of this environment all the time, with lots of people of all ages moving around in a bit of a disorganised style, but, overall, it definitely gave me a nice scope on the descriptive scenery, the layout of the scenes themselves, lighting, etc., and the fact that it's fastened onto the back of my hand also allows me to use that to shift focus around and gain a perspective of the environment quite easily.

The mini android phone's battery only used up roundabout 20 percent over the whole time-period - ended up on 82% when finally got done working with it, and, the hearing aid unit was working fine all the way through, which is nice to know since means you can rely on this combination for longer time periods out-and-about.