In August 2019 at a Creative Lab hackathon, Thomas challenged us to imagine if technology could help him run independently.

My colleague Dror Ayalon and I, conceived of, concepted, and prototyped the first iteration of the solution: could the technology most folks have in their pockets – a consumer smartphone and headphones – plus a guideline on the ground enable a person who is blind or low vision to run independently?

We partnered with computer vision engineers from Google Research to explore and refine the system over 2019 and 2020:

Jan 2020: Thomas runs his first independent mile at The Armory Track in NYC.
Jul 2020: Thomas runs independently outside at a county park in Westchester County, NY as his family looks on in support.
Nov 2020: Thomas runs New York Road Runner’s Virtual Run for Thanks 5K in Central Park using only the Guideline technology.

In 2021, we partnered with Achilles International on a 20+ city iterative testing program. We trained their leadership and local chapters to facilitate trial and feedback with their communities. We took this direct input to further refine the onboarding and navigation system.

Also in 2021, Guideline was featured in the Tokyo Paralympics Opening Ceremony and local blind runner Masamitsu Misono ran an independent 10K along the beach near his home in Chiba, Japan.

In 2022, again in Japan, our Tokyo team and the local Achilles International chapter worked together to participate in ASICS World Ekiden, a virtual long-distance relay road race. Six blind runners collectively ran 42.195km in 4 hours 29 minutes and 44 seconds using Guideline technology.

Finally, in 2023, the Project Guideline team released all of our work to the open-source community. It includes source code for the core platform (DeepLabV3+, ARCore, etc), an Android application, pre-trained ML models, and a 3D simulation framework.