My experience throughout this whole project was a series of ups and downs. It was such a relief when our codes started working and it was also very frustrating when we were troubleshooting and debugging the codes. It felt like we could not see the light at the end of the tunnel. I had the opportunity to go down to Ngee Ann Polytechnic’s Dialogue in the Dark to interview Kah Yong and Lynn for our project. As per our agreement, I had to first go on a tour in their Dark Site to experience what it is like living as a blind person. Truthfully, I did not really see a need to go on a tour as my main objective was to have an interview with the employees. However, I am thankful for the experience as it immersed me into the world of a blind person and made me vulnerable and reliable on others. It is true that many of the vision-impaired want independence just as a sighted-person does, however, the loss of sight may cause them to rely on others more than they would like to. After my Dark Site experience, I then spoke to Kah Yong and Lynn and we had a great dialogue about the blind community in Singapore, some of the available help they can get as well as how they thought our device would benefit them.
They were very optimistic and even gave pointers and different scenarios we should consider, and we definitely did our best to improve our device to best suit their needs. For me, I felt that it was really important to hear from them first-hand and to understand how practical our project is. Although it may not sound as amazing as a drone, it does have real-life impact and I think my group has come to realise that along the way.
Apart from the market research, I spent the bulk of my time coding and programming. We really wanted to create a product that can be good enough for field tests and I am thankful that we are able to reach that stage. Having almost no background in coding, (I only did 1 semester of Python and I’m a Bioscience student!), this project has really thrown me into the deep waters and forced me to learn how to swim. It is not easy learning and understanding machine learning, template matching, hough line transformation etc., but through trial and error, many youtube tutorials as well as reading through various documentations, we’ve all managed to pull through. 🙂