

Independence Day - AndrewGaspar
http://news.microsoft.com/stories/independence-day/

======
kaptain
It's disappointing to see the cynicism and negativity directed to this
announcement. Yes, the presentation is a bit lacking: the website is difficult
to read for many and the video seems to be a big ad. But the message is so
hopeful. I'm not blind/visually challenged/whatever the correct terminology
is, but this announcement/description/advertisement made me happy.

It made me happy not because this is another channel to bring advertisers and
consumers together (as others have pointed out) but because it seems like a
way to leverage technology to really give help and hope to others.

Is there a reason why Microsoft shouldn't put their branding forward and
promote their own devices if they put up money for the research? Apple does
this all the time. I hope we take joy in the possibilities of freedom that
this technology could provide.

~~~
hrktb
What bothers me is that the most important part of this project is to get a
lot of existing entities to do something for the visual impaired people (e.g.
put bluetooth devices everywhere, create sevices to push the information to
users), and I feel this part of the project is brushed away in a "we have
great ideas, surely everyone will be conviced to make them possible" attitude.

There is already realtime tracking of the train delays where I live, and it
just doesn't work (regularly a train will be displayed as arriving to a
station, when clearly it's not there, and 5 min after it gets rescheduled).
Telling me in nice video that we'll expand this kind of experience to vuses
and a lot of other things, and it will help blind people to workaround
unexpected things just feels like wild fantasy.

About the other companies, Apple's doesn't advertise feel good prototypes of
"boil the ocean" types of projects. They didn't come with a "wouldn't it be
great if you could pay for things with our technology ? Imagine if everyone
put this beacon everywhere in the world" video telling fluffy stories in
advance.

They prototyped the barcode payment system in their shop, you could actually
use it with existing devices, and they're pushing their NFC payment with a
nationwide partner networks with working payment terminals from the get go,
doing the hard work upfront.

~~~
radiorental
'There is already realtime tracking of the train delays where I live, and it
just doesn't work'

The important point is not that the data is flawed, it's accessibility to that
data. Leveling the playing field.

~~~
hrktb
That the data is already accessible. It has an app, it has a website. If you
can use the accessibility features of any smartphone then you have access to
it.

The leveling of the playing field you mention is not some moonshot, some dream
to hold dear to one's heart. It certainly can still be done better, but it's
already done competently.

------
yantramanav
I'm not sure what's the reason to be cynical here. I'm an iOS developer who
uses an Android device personally and I'm loving this new Microsoft (Post
Ballmer). This was exactly the wish of developers in 2002, that MS should
become contributing OpenSource citizen.

The Roslyn project, F#, Docker integration, MS Band etc clearly show that MS
has learned it's lessons and are responsible citizens of OSS world.

Kudos Microsoft.

~~~
higherpurpose
The MS Band has an open source OS? I must've missed that.

~~~
radiorental
OSS is not the same as 'Open Source Operating System. While I wouldn't say
there's much OSS in the Band I think the OP's intent is that Microsoft is
being more open

"Plays well with others. We've established partnerships with key service
providers who embrace our vision of healthier living. And we're open to even
more. Microsoft Health as a platform will be strengthened by broader
collaboration from device and service partners. See how connecting to the
partners we have today can make your Microsoft Band experience even more
amazing."

------
lukasm
The site is unreadable.

Here is the video
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEzncMLLOxE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEzncMLLOxE)

~~~
scoot
I don't know, I found the audio combined with the text & images incredibly
engaging, although I did wish for a visual cue from time to when I lost my
place (I was reading in sync, but got distracted).

~~~
dbpatterson
Perhaps it worked better on your browser, but the content was so delayed that
many times I scrolled past it before it decided to load. So I was constantly
having to scroll back and forth to try to figure out whether a blank spot was
truly blank (sometimes it was). Pretty frustrating. And the irony is almost
too much...

~~~
fourstar
There's a big button in the upper right hand corner for an audio version, ya
dingus. Ever thought that might be useful for people who can't read the
website?

~~~
simonh
I can read perfectly well. But if the web site I'm looking at is so badly
designed that it's unreadable, why should I expect that an audio version will
be better thought out?

There are perfectly good reasons for providing audio content on a web site,
but having a badly designed site isn't one of them.

~~~
Eyas
I think he GP was referring to visually impaired people, per the post they
were responding to (about the "irony", etc.).

------
NLips
My one quibble with the article is that calling Reading a suburb of London is
quite misleading. I understand (North?) Americans use the word differently to
Europeans on the whole, but Reading is a Medieval town with a net commuter
flow inwards - it's the local hub of economic activity, and is the largest
town (it hasn't got city status) in the UK.

For context, in terms of its economy, size, distance from London etc, it's not
much different to calling Oxford <edit>or Windsor</edit> a suburb of London.

~~~
Retric
We often call smaller city's suburbs of larger ones. DC 'suburbs' extend out
60+ miles and include several mid-sized city's. "Greater Metropolitan area" is
often a better term. EX: Fairfax city is in a similar location relative to DC
and takes 1h 20min to get their by subway, it's also inside fairfax county
which has ~1Million people. However, large numbers of people commute from west
of Fairfax into DC.

So IMO, it's consistant when you look at overall traffic / commuter flows.

~~~
NLips
I think the term loses a lot of meaning if used just for the same distances in
the UK as in the US. Particularly because the main consensus for 'suburb'
seems to be that it's a residential area, which the commuter flows suggest
that Reading is not. Perhaps the best benchmark is merely whether a place is
treated as a sub-district (albeit far-flung) of a city? I'd say that doesn't
apply to Reading, but perhaps the same is true of Fairfax.

Your final remark is a little confusing - what is consistent looking at
commuter flows? You mentioned that large numbers of people commute from west
of Fairfax into DC, and I said Reading has a net influx of commuters. Those
statements don't directly contradict each other, but certainly don't
explicitly agree!

~~~
Retric
Suppose 100k people live in fairfax and 150k people work in fairfax. That's a
net influx. But if 300k people commute though fairfax IMO that point's to it
being part of a larger collective.

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sargegood
Terrible web design for those of us with a vision impairment.

~~~
oliyoung
Yeah, the irony that is for people with vision impairment and that site is
hard to read and navigate is strong

~~~
jsmeaton
My vision is fine and I still had trouble with that site, enough that I closed
it early. Terrible scrolling and delayed loading ruined that experience.

~~~
gsk
They are talking about helping blind people and you are talking about terrible
scrolling and closing the website?

------
snarfy
Complaints about the website aside, this technology is great and is exactly
the type of thing microsoft needs to be developing.

------
3327
This is great I wish more large corps were putting money into stuff like this.
its a real problem and without realizing business and some awesome tech will
come out of it.

------
reuven
My sister-in-law recently became blind after many years of declining sight. It
is heartbreaking to see how difficult even the most seemingly simple journeys
have become for her. (And I'm quite impressed by the way that she has been
pushing herself, even though it's clearly quite difficult for her.)

I think that the video is a bit too optimistic about how easy it can be for
blind people to walk around. But I also think that the idea -- using a
combination of smart phones, Bluetooth and Wifi markers, and headphones -- is
a very clever one, and is a very good start.

It is going to take decades for such a technology to become stable and mature.
But I'm impressed and pleased to see Microsoft investing in such technologies.

Oh, and are they hinting that there might be ads aimed at blind people? Yes. I
don't know how that is any different from Google offering "free" e-mail and
search in exchange for ads. My metric for whether this is worthwhile isn't
whether Microsoft puts up ads, but rather whether blind people benefit.

------
xyclos
"a reminder you're walking by a place with great Chinese takeout"

is this just a way to target ads at people with a disability? if all I'm
trying to do is get form point A to point B, the last think I want is
"interesting facts about history" or targeted ads.

~~~
stevenjohns
It could be an incentive for shop owners to install such a beacon, thus
increasing their frequency and improving the system. I doubt they would be
ads, but rather just the name of the store and maybe some sort of rating
reference or something.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>"I doubt they would be ads, but rather just the name of the store and maybe
some sort of rating reference or something." //

That sounds like an advert to me. Shop owners will consider the ROI, if they
think there are enough blind people with such a device that will be attracted
in to spend by use of this system they'll get it. It's an advert, like a shop
window display, surely.

------
politician
Great story, and a neat device that, in my opinion, has a better consumer
electronics future than Google Glass.

------
mattlutze
I'm impressed with the scope and maturity of the concept they're presenting
here. Small attempts at improving usability of the world for the visually
impaired have always been kinda cool -- things like chirping walk-signal
actuators at crosswalks -- but have always been disparate and half-baked. It'd
be remarkable if Microsoft's mass and momentum behind a system like this could
be implemented on a large scale in a city to demonstrate how beneficial a
fully baked system can be.

And, to fuel the fire, the page design was top-notch, except for the random
2-column blocks which seem an interesting choice given the nature of variable
screen sizes.

------
tripzilch
IMO the biggest news about it is MS putting their clout behind it. A blind
friend of mine told me a few years ago already he participated in some kind of
experiment with mobile navigation. He then preferred his own ears and guide
dog. But then, this was _just_ before the smartphone revolution really took
off, and we got ubiquitous Internet all over the place. I think right now is a
better moment than back then.

While I'm here I still do want to complain about the website :P Why? Because
it stressed me out. There's no reason a webpage should go out of their way to
do that. It made me nervous how much of the text+pictures only started to fade
in as I already scrolled halfway _past_ it. Why does it even need to fade at
all? It's already scrolled in and out of view. I guess this is an example of
how, with normal pages, everybody has their own customary way of navigating
the information, and as designers take more and more control of that
experience, it's going to cause friction and differences. I can imagine how
this could match someone's particular way of interacting with a page, but it's
not mine. I stopped reading halfway through as it was stressing me out (I
didn't need this before my first coffee was yet to kick in).

Regardless, as everyone is screaming, let's pay attention to this great
project, helping blind people.

------
euske
From what I've seen, iPhone is the de facto standard of mobile phones for
visually impaired for now, because its VoiceOver function is pretty well made,
and more importantly, its UI experience is far less varied than its
competitors, i.e. Windows Phones and Androids. It has already a strong
community and support from organizations like AFB. I hope this bring them a
more healthy competition among the tech companies.

------
hrktb
This could be a prototype project where three or four routes in one or two
cities will be enhanced with bluetooth, a dozen of test subjects will try it
on a refular basis, a few articles in the news will appear praising this
visionnary concept and two months later everybody forgets about it.

Or it could be a proof of concept of a much wider plan, and from the results
we would see the start of a massive undertaking involving huge swaths of
cities clearing budget to put a bluetooth beacon on every street corner,
public transport infrastructure is massively updated to have up to date
realtime data accessible from the mobile apps In a usable format, shop owner
and public facilities join the movement to enhanced their places for
discoverability.

If this was an IBM project partenaring a metropolitan city council, I would be
expecting the later. It's a Microsoft story centering on the technological
aspect of it, I guess it's the former.

------
bequanna
A good reminder that there are novel implementations of existing technology
(mobile devices, beacons) that can markedly improve the lives of those with
disabilities.

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Rapzid
This has got to be the first article I've read that has incorporated ambient
sound. The loop is terrible, but it's still pretty awesome! The coconuts were
annoying though.. I hope more articles introduce ambient sound... I'm
imagining this being integrated into novels.

Also, this is fantastic. I can totally see this being of interested to the
sighted as well; maybe it would see better uptake than glass.

~~~
Cthulhu_
That's what I was thinking about - inner-ear bluetooth stereo headset that
does the basics like notification pings, but perhaps also act as a 6th sense,
things like navigation cues so you can use your navigation app on your bicycle
without blocking your hearing or looking at your phone.

~~~
Rapzid
Also think self-tours. People could setup tours around places like Rome and
vote them up. You load it up, then walk around the city getting tips on the
hot spots and history. I believe there is a lot of potential for this sort of
contextual audio cuing.

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kruk
It will take a huge amount of beacons to make this useful. But a worthy cause
and an interesting solution. Let's wait and see if anything comes out of it.

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moeedm
That website sucks.

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donohoe
Native advertising

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sard420
So customized billboards for the blind.

------
coherentpony
Colour me cynical, but this seems like the perfect opportunity for Microsoft
to take payment from corporations to adjust a blind person's route past said
corporations' branches, thereby providing a sneaky targeted advertising
campaign.

~~~
stevep98
Hmm, you just thought of this, Microsoft didn't.

It says more about you than it does about Microsoft.

