Glidance 2024 Year-in-Review: Celebrating the Evolution of Glide

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Watch Glide's 2024 End Of Year Founder's Video Message Here!

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Dear Gliders,

As 2024 comes to a close, we wanted to take a moment to reflect and share on the incredible progress we’ve made as a company, a community, and ultimately – dare we say – a movement towards ushering in a new era of independent mobility for people who are blind or low vision.

We began this year with an early design prototype for Glide, 182 early fans, a handful of team members, and an unbelievable sense of optimism tinged with trepidation. We had not yet been to CSUN to reveal “Ada” (our latest prototype) to the community; we had not yet engaged with Orientation & Mobility organizations and partners; and few knew about our bold ambitions and goals building a groundbreaking primary navigation and mobility aid.

As we began to step out into the world and step up our engagement through monthly Glider calls, in-person and virtual demo days, we truly could not anticipate the level of excitement, encouragement, and optimism generated in the community.

Today, over 6,000 Gliders have joined us on this journey. We’ve held over 20 in-person demo days across the US, Canada, and UK, attended by over 1,200 community members who believe in the promise of an autonomous, AI-guided mobility aid. Many of you have been with us and seen our evolution, from the
early Ada prototypes to Alpha 1 and Alpha 1.5, as we’ve developed the underlying technology and features including dynamic braking, steering, haptics in the handle, audio, and autonomous navigation capabilities.

Together, we are pioneering the era of intelligent guides for the BLV community. This is an inevitable future, and we couldn’t be more grateful to all of you for every comment, question, concern, email, and piece of feedback that is helping us shape this future together.  

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How has the Glide product evolved from January of 2024?

For starters, Glide was completely redesigned from the beginning of this year, a design that continues to evolve as we gather more in-person feedback indoors and outdoors through Alpha testing and our demo days. We’ve developed new ways to control steering and braking, evolved the sensor array, and built the custom electronics and firmware used to train the Glidance Sensible Wayfinding software. We are miles ahead of where we started, yet we also feel we are only just beginning to light up what Glide will be capable of.  

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What are our biggest learnings from this year?

Over 1,200 demos and user studies have taught us a lot of key insights and nuances around everything from the design, weight, portability, ergonomic comfort, battery, prioritization of features and special cases for many folks), as well as the core requirements that our sensors, detection algorithms, and AI must meet for you to feel safe and confident to make your way with Glide as your primary mobility aid.

Indeed through User Testing with community members on their home turf, our baseline goal is that you are able to and want to walk all of your routes with Glide alone. That means that using Glide must be easier, faster, less stressful, more effective, and ultimately more enjoyable than how you navigate today.

We’ve begun to understand the nuances critical to success in this goal – starting with the initial onboarding and orientation to Glide. From the importance of giving people time to adjust to following Glide in a quiet area, to the differences in hand and wrist positioning (and how people familiar with white canes and guide dogs use Glide differently in each hand) and much more, we are incorporating these learnings into the product and plans to ensure that everyone who picks up Glide for the first time will have a smooth and safe onboarding experience.

Throughout this process, we’ve identified durability issues that we are reworking, tested and worked on steering angles and sensitivity, braking effectiveness, optimal wheel size, obstacle navigation thresholds, and sensitivity and types of feedback – both haptic and audio – desired for different scenarios users
may encounter. We have plenty more to explore in 2025, but we feel that we have a solid foundation to grow and learn from.

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Looking ahead at 2025…

This coming January, we will continue our Alpha testing, with the goal of finalizing the physical design and readying the device for manufacturing. From there, we turn our attention to refining and evolving “Freestyle Navigation” and the underlying features it entails – iterating, tuning, and adjusting until the experience begins to hum. And we’ll be doing so with you, with our earliest pioneers, and sharing our progress as we go.

From there, we expect to see Beta devices rolling out in early spring, where we aim to get to the point where we can start leaving Glide beta devices behind in the hands of our community for an extended period of time through the spring and summer, as we iterate and iterate until in the autumn, when we plan to begin shipping production units.

When we look back, 2024 has truly exceeded our expectations. Not just in terms of Glide’s evolution as a product, but the incredible support and engagement we’ve experienced from you, the community, our partners, and those who are deeply invested in and believe in Glide’s potential as a revolutionary device that brings about a new era of independent mobility, confidence, and safe navigation for everyone who is affected by blindness or low vision.

We’re ready for what’s next, and can’t wait to continue this journey with you!

Happy Holidays, and a very Happy New Year, from our Glidance family to yours!