person: See you at the finish. person: All right, Thomas.
Panek: Thank you very much.
How are you, brother? person: Take care, buddy.
Panek: All right, you want to show me the way?
Straight to the right? person: Yeah, yeah.
[crowd cheering]
Panek: My name is Thomas Panek, and I'm a blind man.
I'm an athlete. I'm a runner.
I'm a father.
I'm a CEO.
I have a genetic condition, it turns out,
that would make me blind by the time I was a young adult.
When you--when you run, you're like a kid.
You feel free.
You--you go as fast as you can, and eventually I could do that anymore.
I--I lost that part of me.
I ended up getting some volunteer human guides to run with me,
but I was always behind.
Even though my legs and my lungs had the capacity to run faster,
I had to follow the person in front of me.
Having the ability to do it independently
was really important to me.
Yang: Thomas came to Google during a one-day Hackathon event,
and during that event he asked us...
Panek: Can we help a blind runner navigate?
Can--can we make that happen?
Can we make navigation for a blind runner possible?
Yang: It's not obvious to us how to do it.
But we came up with this basic prototype.
Watkinson: So what we came up with was a system that just uses
a regular Android phone.
The machine-learning algorithm that we have detects the line,
and it can tell whether the line is to the runner's left, right, or center.
We can then send signals to the runner that guides them left and right
based on their positioning.
Panek: The first time we went out, we didn't even know
if sound would be enough to guide me,
so it's sort of that beta testing process that you go through.
Yang: From human eyes, it's very obvious.
It's very obvious to recognize the line.
Teaching a machine-learning model to do that is not that easy.
Hall: You step left and right as you're running,
so there's, like, a shake to the line left and right.
As soon as you start going outdoors, now the light is a lot more variable.
Yang: Tree shadows, falling leaves,
and also the lines on the ground can be very narrow,
and there may be only a few pixels for the computer vision model to recognize.
Ayalon: We didn't want to rely on any internet connection.
We had to take a huge model and to shrink them into something
that we can run on the device as fast as we need
for someone to run full speed with.
[gentle piano music]
Panek: Only been waiting for 25 years for this minute.
[laughter]
People with vision don't want blind people to take risks.
That's what keeps people who are blind from participating in society fully.
The safest thing for a blind person to do is to sit still.
I ain't sitting still.
There was no tether.
There was no stick.
There was no furry dog.
It was just being with yourself.
[breathing heavily]
Absolute freedom.
Oh, my goodness.
person: That was amazing.
Panek: That's the first time I've run alone in...
in decades.
Just through the woods, you know, by myself.
I never thought we'd be here, you know?
I didn't think we'd ever be here.
It's independence, you know?
I'm so dependent on people every day, you,
the kids, Blaze.
Just me and a line, huh?
[upbeat guitar music]
person: I am about to test a--
a pretty neat-sounding app by Google called Guideline.
person: I don't walk by myself outside of my home.
person: I'm feeling a little nervous.
I've never walked without a cane or a my guide dog before.
person: It's kind of scary, but okay.
person: Interesting.
person: Wow.
person: You good?
Okay?
Off you go.
person: Oh, 'cause she wants to do that uphill.
Mary Ann [inaudible]. person: Uphill?
person: [laughs] Yeah.
person: I can describe it as, like, flying freely.
person: Freeing, I think, would be, like, the word that I describe it as.
person: And I was able to walk down the street, and I felt safe.
Panek: Not everybody has a chance to have a guide dog
or a volunteer human guide.
It's really an opportunity to provide an individual who's blind
with the freedom to be mobile and active
and fit and exercise.
person: Project Guideline is an early-stage research project.
As we continue our research, we hope to work with more organizations.
To learn more, please visit:
goo.gle/projectguideline.