Local Navigation

Navigation at the scale of a few metres, where the task is to bring a blind traveller into direct body-scale interaction with a specific landmark object — sitting in a particular chair, pressing an elevator button, reaching a door handle, boarding through a specific train door. Local navigation is distinguished from global navigation because its latency, interface, and accuracy requirements are different: speech-based turn-by-turn instructions are too slow at short range, sub-metre positioning matters, and the user often needs to orient their body to interact with the object rather than just arrive near it. It is a recognised gap in most indoor-navigation systems, which typically stop guidance once the user is 'near enough'.