How Glide's AI Guide Compares To My Cane - Reflections From An Early Pilot User

Casey Mathews is one of our Founding Gliders - and among the first to receive Glide as part of our Pilot Rollout.

Yesterday, he published a blog about his experience getting to know Glide so far: the unboxing, the first steps around his home, learning to trust the device, and taking it outdoors on familiar routes. He documents what's working, what isn't, and even how Glide stacks up against the cane in certain situations.

Feedback like Casey's - like that of all our pilot Gliders - is critical to our learning at this stage. We don't expect everything to be perfect; that's the whole point of a limited pilot rollout. We want to uncover Glide's quirks, where it misses the mark, and where we can improve both the software and the user experience, so that when we move into production rollout for our wider community, the device has been truly been battle-tested.

A big thanks to Casey for taking the time to write all of this down and share it with us and the broader community! You can read his original post on his blog here, as well as below: https://webfriendlyhelp.com/lets-glide-what-an-ai-guide-does-that-my-cane-cant/
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Let’s Glide - What an AI Guide Does That My Cane Can’t [Repost]

By Casey Mathews, WebFriendlyHelp.com.
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When you power up a Glide and it finishes booting, it says two words to you: "Let's glide!"

Those two words have been a long time coming for me. As a Founding Glider, I put money down early and got in line for one of the first units, and I'm part of Glidance's pilot rollout. Glide is billed as the first self-guided mobility aid for blind and low vision travelers, an alternative to a cane or a guide dog. Glide rolls along in front of you on two wheels, sees the world with cameras, and steers you around whatever is in your way.

You set the pace and Glide does the steering. Your own forward motion rolls it along, and the device decides where that motion goes, stopping you, turning you, and pushing back against your hand when the way ahead isn’t safe. It handles continuous travel better than a cane does, and a cane still investigates an edge and recovers a lost position better than it does. The two aren’t really competing for the same work.

Before any of that, let me be clear about what this is. I've had a handful of walks with this device, all of them in places I already know well, my own house and my own neighborhood. There are no miles on it yet, I haven't taken it anywhere unfamiliar, and living with it long enough to really know it is still ahead of me. So what you're getting here is my first impressions, and I expect they'll change as I go.

I did the first walks on my own indoors, then outside with my wife Judy along. Later, Ellie Carlson from the Glidance team joined the two of us and we did some more testing indoors and outdoors, and even crossed some streets.

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Out of the box

Taking Glide out of the box for the first time, it was obvious that this had been designed with blind and low vision people in mind from the start, rather than adapted for us after the fact.

Little things gave it away. Plugging the device in to charge, you can hear and feel the motors move and the machine vibrate, so you know the connection took. Every button has a rubberized texture and feels like a small bubble rising up out of the surface, so your fingers find them without hunting. The power button carries a Braille letter P. Press anything at all and it either makes a sound or says something out loud. There was no guesswork at all, and I can't tell you how rare that is.

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Who does what

The part that took me longest to understand is also the simplest to say. You set the pace, and Glide does the steering.

You push, and Glide steers. That's the whole arrangement. You walk at whatever speed you feel like walking, your own forward motion rolls the device along, and Glide decides where that motion goes. It stops you, it turns you, it pushes back against your hand when the way ahead isn't safe. Your job is to follow along and keep your body behind your hand.

The button that runs all of this sits in the center of the grip, under your fingers. Anybody with guide dog experience will recognize what it does, because it works a bit like your forward command. Press it and Glide heads off in whatever direction you happen to be pointing, and pressing it again resets the direction of travel any time you like.

That last part means more than it does at first glance. Glide will often turn slightly on its own to get around something, or because a sidewalk bends. Sometimes it turns and I don't want to turn, because I know where I am and there's a door over that way I'm trying to reach. Point yourself where you actually want to go, press the button, and Glide takes the new heading and carries on.

When Glide can't figure out how to get around something, that part falls to you. Rotate the device slowly from side to side, roughly from ten o'clock around to two o'clock, and feel what the wheels do. When they run without pushback or braking, you're free to glide again.

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Walking indoors

My first walks were inside my own home, in indoor mode. Up and down the hallway, around the hearth between the living room and the dining area, around the table.

Indoors felt natural almost right away. Being able to just walk, and let Glide handle the navigation, was a pleasure.

Two habits were hard for me to break. Sweeping was the first. A cane never comes out in my house, but the instinct to reach out and feel for what's around me still lives in my hands, and Glide doesn't work that way. Neither does a guide dog, so at least that part was familiar territory.

Steering was the second one, and it surprised me by being the harder of the two. Breaking that habit took more effort indoors than it did outside, precisely because I know my own house. Knowing what was there gave me opinions about where the device ought to be going. Familiarity made letting go harder, not easier.

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Walking outdoors

Outside was rougher at first. Early on, Glide didn't do well with clearance errors. It ran me into a mailbox. Another time it caught me on part of a leafy tree.

During the pilot I used two devices, and the hardware on them was identical. What differed was the software, which was newer on the second unit, and the clearance problems improved markedly.

That's worth thinking about, because it tells you what kind of product this is. The hardware is finished. The software is at the worst it will ever be, and it only improves from here. Problems get recorded, worked on, and pushed back out to the fleet, and Glidance describes that process on their own site as over the air learning shared across every device.

Which is the whole reason for a pilot rollout in the first place. Glidance put these units in the hands of a group of us specifically to go out and turn up this kind of thing, and my run in with the mailbox is now a data point. Hundreds of those, gathered across all of us, are what the models get refined on.

Once the clearance issues settled down, walking down the street and not running into anything felt incredibly freeing. There are only two other ways I've ever walked that quickly, holding a sighted guide's arm or holding a dog's harness, and this device has now joined that very short list.

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Crossing streets

Crossing is where the difference between this and a cane gets sharpest, and it doesn't all fall in Glide's favor.

A cane sweeps left and right and finds the edges. You locate where the sidewalk ends and the street begins, and after you cross you sweep again and find the up curb. All of that sweeping is doing a lot of work you may not think about.

With Glide, you line yourself up to the street the way you always would, walk forward, and feel it brake and push back at the curb. Then you set your alignment again. What changes is that your feet and your shoulders matter much more than they used to. Plant your feet parallel to the curb, listen to the flow of traffic, and get yourself squared up, because Glide crosses on the alignment you gave it and nothing else. It holds a straight line while it does it, so a degree or two off at the down curb is several feet off by the time you reach the other side. That kind of precision is hard, and Ellie said as much when she was out here.

To be clear, Glide never told me when to go. That call is mine, the same as it's always been, and Glidance says so plainly in their own materials. When I was ready, I put the device into street crossing mode and across we went.

Sometimes I came up on the far curb off to one side of the ramp, and correcting meant reaching for the turn buttons. Other times it nailed the crossing. Nailing it felt terrific, because the street simply got crossed and I kept going about my business without doing anything extra.

That off to one side business is a known one, and the fix in the works is my favorite thing I've heard so far. Glidance is teaching Glide to recognize the up curb ramp when there is one and use it as a target, so a Glider who set off a little crooked gets carried back toward the ramp instead of falling back on gutter recovery to go find it and get out of the road. Hundreds of real crossings from real Gliders are what teach it that, which is the reason a pilot rollout exists.

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Where the cane still wins

Three times now I've found myself reaching for the cane, and the pattern is pretty clear.

Sweeping to find an edge is the first. A cane tells you where the sidewalk stops and the grass or the street begins, and it tells you quickly, with a motion you've done ten thousand times. Glide will stop you at that same edge, and stopping is about all it does. It won't trace the line for you or tell you which way the edge runs.

Picking Glide up to carry it around something is the second, and that comes up more than you'd expect. Usually it happens when the device can't find a way through and the answer is to lift it, move myself, and set it back down. With a cane in my free hand I can feel out what's really there, work out how far around I need to go, then swing Glide back into position and carry on, and without a cane in that hand I'm mostly guessing.

Recovery is the third, and for my money it's the important one. When I come up on the far side somewhere I didn't intend, a quick sweep of a cane finds that up curb in a hurry and tells me where I am. Glide can get me moving again, but it can't hand me that information the same way.

The way to think of it is that a cane investigates and recovers better, while Glide handles continuous travel better. The two aren't really competing for the same work.

Here's another example, because a lot of people are considering this in light of a cane or a guide dog. Sometimes on a straight stretch, indoors or out, walking with Glide feels a little herky jerky. The software is compensating for something it can see, and that something might be a real obstacle or it might be debris on the sidewalk. A cane just plows through and you either don't know or don't care. A guide dog won't veer unless it has a reason you'd agree with. Glide reacts to everything it sees.

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What I didn't love

Clearance improved, so I won't go back over that, but there are two more things I want to mention.

Turns sometimes come a bit early, and my own driveway is where I notice it. Knowing the left is there, I press the left turn button, and Glide takes the turn once it judges the turn safe. Every so often that lands an inch or two before the actual opening, which is small in the scheme of things and still manages to nag at me.

Coming up off target at the far curb bothers me more. Fixing that was easy enough because I knew the street. Somewhere unfamiliar, that same error takes some extra figuring out when it happens, and how I sort it will depend on the situation. It might mean pulling out a cane, it might mean something else. Any of us who travel with a cane have had to work out an unexpected situation at a crossing, and guide dog users run into it less often but still run into it. This wouldn't be a new kind of problem, just a new reason for it.

Neither of these is news to Glidance, and I'm not writing them down as complaints. They are what a pilot rollout is for. The plan they've laid out for us is to gather this exact stuff from the people who are actually out walking, refine the models on it, and put additional layers and features into the software between now and the production rollout, with over the air updates carrying the improvements to every device after that. I hand them something new every time I go outside, and I expect this section to get shorter.

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Two gotchas

Because Glide reacts to what it sees, it changes direction on you, and those changes can be somewhat sharp. Nothing is going to jump a foot to the right or left, so don't picture anything dramatic. What you get is a series of little nudges one way or the other, and they arrive without warning. It isn't smooth the way a guide dog is smooth. Anybody whose balance gets thrown by sudden movement should think hard about that before spending the money. That one is my own observation rather than anything the company has published.

The other comes straight from Glidance. Their frequently asked questions page states that Glide isn't designed to support your weight, that significant downward pressure on the handle will make it roll forward, and that it isn't built to be used with a support cane, walker, rollator, or wheelchair. Anyone relying on a mobility aid for balance support is being told this isn't their device, and taking them at their word is wise.

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So, should you get one?

I say yes! Especially if you like getting out but walking with your cane has turned into a chore.

Go, but know what you're getting into. You're handing over the steering, and that means when Glide turns you follow it rather than argue with it. Then, when the two of you end up stuck between a rock and a hard place, you're the one who sorts it out. That split takes some getting used to, and it's the biggest adjustment in the whole business.

Glide currently runs $1,499 with a $30 monthly subscription. That's a real investment with ongoing subscription costs on top of it. What I can tell you is that a walk down my own street, moving at a speed I've only ever managed holding somebody's arm or a dog's harness, was worth writing about.

There's plenty I haven't tried yet, starting with taking Glide somewhere it has never been. I'll keep using it, and I plan to do more of these posts as updates come in and as I get it into different situations.

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Thank you

I want to say something to the people who built this, and I mean it.

Amos Miller had the idea. Having the idea is the part everybody hears about. Carrying it through years of engineering and funding, when most people would have quietly let it go, is a different thing altogether, and I don't think I understood how hard that must have been until I had one of these in my own hands. The investors who backed him deserve a share of that credit, because none of this happens without somebody willing to put real money behind a product built for a market the world overlooks as a matter of habit.

Then there are the engineers, who solved problems I couldn't describe properly if I tried, and the support staff who answer the same questions over and over and never once make you feel like a bother. Ellie Carlson came out and walked my own streets with me, which I don't take for granted, because you don't get that from most companies at any price.

To all of you at Glidance, thank you. What you've made is already a real game changer for blind and visually impaired people, and everything I said earlier still stands, it only gets better from here. You gave me a walk down my own street at a speed I haven't managed in years, and I'm grateful I got to be one of the people who tried it early.

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FAQ

What is the Glide?

Glide is a self-guided mobility aid for blind and low vision travelers, made by Glidance, and billed as an alternative to a cane or a guide dog. It rolls along in front of you on two wheels, sees the world with cameras, and steers you around whatever is in your way.

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How much does Glide cost?

Glide currently runs $1,499 with a $30 monthly subscription. Glidance lists both on their Glide product page.

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Does Glide tell you when it’s safe to cross the street?

No. Glide never told me when to go, and Glidance says the same on their frequently asked questions page, where they describe the shipping mode as one in which you make all the navigation decisions and Glide handles obstacles and cliff avoidance. You line yourself up to the street the way you always would and make the call yourself, then you put Glide into street crossing mode and it holds a straight line on the alignment you gave it.

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Can you use Glide with a walker, rollator, or wheelchair?

Not at the moment. Glidance’s frequently asked questions page states that Glide isn’t designed to support your weight, that significant downward pressure on the handle will make it roll forward, and that it isn’t built to be used with a support cane, walker, rollator, or wheelchair.

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Does Glide work indoors?

Yes, it has an indoor mode. My first walks were inside my own home, up and down the hallway and around the table, and indoors felt natural almost right away.

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Do you steer Glide, or does it steer you?

Glide steers. You push, Glide steers, and that’s the whole arrangement. The button in the center of the grip works a bit like a guide dog’s forward command. Press it and Glide heads off in whatever direction you’re pointing, and pressing it again resets the direction of travel any time you like.

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Let's glide.

Qapla'!

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