The guardian view: detection, tracking, the walking corridor, and a risk score for everything in it.Source footage (both clips): first-person sidewalk video, used for demonstration. The boxes, corridor, and depth map are Vixa’s output.
The depth view: metric distance for every pixel, estimated from a single ordinary camera.

These two clips are the same twelve seconds of footage: a first-person sidewalk walk, processed by Vixa’s engine. On the left, the guardian’s view: every person, car, and dog is found, tracked, and given a live risk score, and the blue strip is the walking corridor — the ground Vixa actually cares about. Notice what it does not do: the people ahead are walking the same direction, so their risk stays at zero and the system stays silent. On the right, the same moment as Vixa’s depth view — real distance for every pixel, in metres, from one ordinary camera. Near things glow warm, far things fade to dark.

Vixa is an assistive navigation system for blind and low-vision pedestrians, built around one idea: a camera pointed forward can see the part of the world a cane cannot reach, and it can decide, in real time, whether anything out there is actually worth interrupting you for.

How it works

Vixa is built to need exactly two things: an ordinary camera and an iPhone. Today that is the phone itself — in your hand or on a chest mount — or, hands-free, a pair of camera glasses like the Ray-Ban Meta with the phone in your pocket. No LiDAR rig, no special sensors, nothing custom. The glasses path is built on Meta’s Wearables Device Access Toolkit and verified end to end with Meta’s simulated glasses; testing on real glasses is the next step.

Camera glasses with labeled parts: capture button, open-ear speakers, power switch, touchpad, and HD camera
Camera glasses put a forward-facing lens at eye level, with open-ear audio that never blocks the street sounds a blind walker relies on.Image: Ray-Ban | Meta, via Amazon
An iPhone lock screen with a green arrow pointing to the Action button on the left side of the phone
Start Vixa with one tap, or from your iPhone’s Action button through Shortcuts.Image: Apple

The camera sees. A forward-facing lens — glasses at eye level, or the phone in your hand or on your chest — streams what is in front of you: the same view a sighted person gets, turning where you turn.

The engine thinks.Vixa’s guardian engine reads that video live. It finds every person, car, bike, and obstacle, measures how far away each one is in real metres, and answers one narrow question: will your path and theirs actually meet — and if so, in how many seconds? Today the engine runs on a Vixa server that the phone streams to; running it on the phone itself is on the roadmap.

Vixa speaks.When something matters, you hear it right away — a beep and a few words — through the glasses’ open-ear speakers or your phone, while your ears stay open to the street. When nothing matters, Vixa stays silent instead of narrating the world at you. And it watches the ground as closely as the traffic: a pothole, a step down, an unexpected curb — announced in metres while it is still steps away, not underfoot.

Starting it takes one tap. Vixa also comes as a “Start Vixa” Shortcut, so on recent iPhones you can put it on the Action button — the small button on the side of the phone — and go from unlocked phone to watching the street in one press. With glasses, it keeps running while the phone stays locked in your pocket.

What makes Vixa different

Smart glasses already come with an assistant. Ask, and it will describe the room, read a menu aloud, translate a label, or name the object in your hand. That is genuinely useful — and it all shares one design: it speaks when you ask. It is a brilliant answer machine.

The street does not wait to be asked. A cyclist can close twenty metres in three seconds; by the time you think to say “what’s ahead of me?”, the moment has passed. Vixa flips the model: it never needs a question. It watches every frame, all the time, and interrupts you only when something is actually coming at you.

It also answers in a different currency. A description says “there is a car.” A measurement says the car is nine metres away, closing at eight metres per second, and will reach you in three. Vixa computes real distances and real seconds for everything in your path, and stays silent when the numbers say walk on. Descriptions inform; measurements protect.

That silence is engineered, not accidental. Alert fatigue is the reason blind users abandon assistive devices, so we treat every false alarm as a safety defect: across our 36 scripted safety scenarios — approaches, crossings, crowds, night, turning, passing traffic, descending stairs — Vixa raises zero false alarms. Validation on real street footage is underway.

And because those judgments run continuously against live video — not as a chat that thinks about one question at a time — an alert arrives in about a second, while there is still time to act. Vixa is not trying to replace the assistant in your glasses. It adds the one thing the assistant does not have: reflexes.