Re: Regarding Lack of Formal Independent Outdoor Travel Training
So in america, if your turning right, and the crossing is red, you can pretty much just ignore it? that just seems utterly loopy to me. In britain while some traffic might take a second stopping, and while you can wait for ages at a crossing (especially in a large city), during those few seconds that the cars get the red light and you get the green, when the bleeper is going everything should legally stop.
When enes described open sewers as ones people jump, I sort of imagined a hole large enough for a person to fall down, and any decent guide dog would walk around that. If the open sewers are more sort of overflowing gutters that it would be possible to walk in (albeit your feet would get pretty disgusting), that might not be the case.
As regards technology replacing a guide dog, well I'm not as certain on that myself due to several major factors. Firstly is the question of adaptability. This is even something that I wonder about with self driving cars, sin ce while I could quite imagine a car that could drive along a normal width road staying away from traffic (especially a regular road like a motorway), I do wonder how a self driving car would find a parking space or negotiate around unexpected obstacles, like tiny country lanes with no propper demarkation or obstacles on the road itself such as road works.
And remember walking around pavements is a far more diverse environment than a road with a lot more factors to take into account.
Also remember dogs have the same abilities of abstract association that humans do. Thus, if I tell reever to find a counter, she looks for anything that appears to be vaguely table shaped with someone standing behind and a queue of people in front of it (or not). Ai's are fine at distinguishing objects with preset categories, but to distinguish an object from a background based just! on desired detail in a totally uncontrolled environment is a very difficult thing for an ai to do, esp ecially with the hundreds of other things that a guide dog does quite instinctively like walking around people, judging positions of moving and none moving obstacles, making instant distance judgements etc.
Then of course there is the more basic and fundamental fact. Dogs can walk!
Just look at how nasa spend millions on developing a martian rover with catapiller tracks, then dump it on mars only for it to slip a wheel in the first pot hole it comes to.
Even n a city, ground is not universally flat, and there are occasions when you'll need to go over things that even miniature tank tracks would have trouble with, (plus I don't think people would appreciate your guide tank running over their lawn!).
So we're a long way from even creating something as good as a guide dog, let alone better.
Myself, I think sat navs will become far more majorly used, and specifically vi orientated sat navs updated instantly with map information about road w
orks, shop positions and the like, much as the google glass is doing. I could also imagine more software assistance on things like reading shop signs, telling colours of road signs etc, but I'm less certain an actual physical guide is in the works, ---- well not until we've actually developed a completely humanoid robot anyway .
URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=152672#p152672
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