Stride — walking,
by sound.

Stride is a pair of AR smart glasses that help blind users move through dense urban environments with the same confidence a sighted pedestrian takes for granted. An invisible interface, designed for someone who has never relied on a visible one.

The system combines computer-vision-based obstacle detection, GPS routing, and spatial audio to render the city as sound. Crosswalks chime ahead of footsteps. Corners arrive with a soft cue placed in the direction you should turn. The user's white cane remains the primary tool; Stride is the ambient companion that the cane never could be.

I started this project after a research conversation with a blind cane-user in the East Village who told me he could navigate his neighborhood with his eyes closed — but felt unsafe two avenues over. The brief became: extend that neighborhood to the whole city.

Today, a blind New Yorker navigating an unfamiliar route stacks together at least three systems: a screen-reader on a phone, a routing app, and the cane itself. The phone, in particular, demands a free hand the user does not have, attention they cannot afford, and visual confirmation they cannot give.

Existing assistive wearables tend to announce — turn-by-turn voice prompts that compete with the soundscape of the street, or vibrating wristbands that overload an already-busy hand. The interventions help, but at a cost.

The opportunity was an interface that spoke the language of the street — sound and position — rather than asking the user to translate from a screen.

The Stride interface is overwhelmingly auditory. I designed a small vocabulary of positional cues — short, pitched tones rendered through bone-conduction speakers so they don't compete with the user's ear — that map to directional intent. A soft chime ahead-left means "your turn is coming." A muted hum to the rear means "vehicle approaching."

Voice is reserved for content the user actively requests: a description of what is in front of them, a re-routing summary, a verbal address. The voice itself was designed with a speech coach — slow, low, patient, and unflappable, like a friend giving directions.

For caregivers and family, a quiet companion app on the phone surfaces the same routes visually, with the option to remotely place a "meeting point" cue along a walk.

The deliverable is a research-backed concept and a working web prototype that simulates Stride's audio interactions on a fixed route from 2nd Ave to 14th St. A sighted user can step through the route and hear the system as the user would — including the way the city itself sounds around the cues.

The most important lesson was about the limits of empathy. I spent a week trying to design from "what would I want if I couldn't see" before I realized that was the wrong question. The right question was "what does the person who can already navigate this block wish they had two blocks over?" Co-designing with blind users changed the system more than any other single decision.

Stride is the work I'm most proud of, and the work I'm most aware is just a beginning. Accessibility is not a feature; it's a posture.