Listen to May Interview, Part 1
Legends and Pioneers of Blindness Assistive Technology
Davis, CA
October 9, 2004
Introduction to interview with Mike May
Tony Candela: If anyone can be named the Father of GPS Technology for Blind Persons, that individual would be Mike May. Through his years with Arkenstone and now with the Sendero Group and his affiliation with Pulse Data International and Pulse Data HumanWare, Mike has striven to develop technologies that take advantage of the advanced global positioning system that has placed that technology into the hands of blind people who carry portable devices.
His affiliation not only with Pulse Data in order to install his GPS technology in the BrailleNote but also other companies has made him a leader in way-finding technology.
Mike has at least three different stories. First, he is an accomplished blind athlete. Next, although without sight since age 6, through modern medical techniques which included stem cell transplants, he has had vision restored to one eye and has been the focus of much study on what happens when someone who has been blind for so long, suddenly regains his eyesight. Then finally, there is Mike May, the leader and pioneer of blindness assistive technology.
We sat in his study in Davis, California and he told me the following story.
Beginning of Interview
Tony Candela: Mike thanks a lot for agreeing to do an oral history interview with me. This is a series that has many luminaries in the blindness assistive technology business within it and we who know about blindness assistive technology consider you to be a luminary.
Mike May: I like the acronym for that, would be BAT.
Tony Candela: Blindness Assistive Technology.
And as we know, bats are very good navigators and we'll get on to all the work you've done with regard to navigation.
Mike May: Good segue.
Tony Candela: I think the world knows Mike May for two major things and then you can add to this because I might not realize that there are more than two major things. But the two major things are all the great work you've done over the years in navigation technology for blind people.
And the other one is your very compelling personal story, which ranges from a wild and crazy kid running through the woods at Enchanted Hills camp, north of San Francisco to the story of your loss of vision and the restoration of some of your eye sight.
And people generally know those two major stories: your technology work and your personal story. Is there another big chunk of Mike May that we don't know about?
Mike May: I suppose the thing that people used to introduce me for, prior to the new vision experience, which happened in 2000. Before that it was always, "Mike May holds the downhill speed skiing record for the totally blind at 65 miles per hour."
Of course, I quickly reassure people that it's only because not many other blind people have decided that they wanted to compete for that record. So when you think about going out and setting a record, you should choose one that nobody else will really want to break and then you're in good shape.
Tony Candela: How long ago did you set that record?
Mike May: That was in Lezark, France, in I think it was '88.
Tony Candela: And it's 2004 now so that's 16 years ago and you told me off tape, you're about to turn 51 years of age.
Mike May: That's right.
Tony Candela: So you were in your thirties when you did that.
You'd been a visually impaired person a real long time before attempting that record.
Mike May: Since age 3 and I didn't start skiing until I was 27.
Tony Candela: Somewhere within the first ten years or so of you becoming a skier you set this record.
Mike May: I was hooked. I just skied every opportunity I got. I lived at the ski resort one season. Between a couple of companies. I just loved it and still do. Not so much for going the fastest speed but for just being out there. And now really the incentive is skiing with my family and my kids.
Tony Candela: Tell us about your family.
We are in Davis, California, in your house. We're in your office. It's got gadgetry all over the place we've had to turn off so that we have a good recording. But left to your own devices you have a lot of technology here. But tell us a bit about your family.
Mike May: It won't be unlikely that something will go off on the hour that I'm not sure I can turn it off or know where it is.
My family, I have two boys, Carson who's 12, Wyndham who's 10, and my wife Jennifer, and she and I met skiing, as a matter of fact. We've been married for 16 years. Married in 1988 and I met her on the ski slopes not long after I started skiing, when I got involved in teaching blind skiing and guiding and she was one of our guides, and I knew her for two or three years before we connected and started dating and got married.
Tony Candela: Where was the ski resort that you were at when you met her?
Mike May: We were at Kirkwood up in the Tahoe area and Ron Saviola, a long-time friend and colleague, started this program in 1978, now called Discovery Blind Sports, and I became co-director and worked directly in that organization for many, many years.
Tony Candela: What was it called back then?
Mike May: Kirkwood Instruction of Blind Skiers, started out in about 1978 and this was after Jean Amir, a French skier who went blind had gone around the country and was starting the program, the BOLD program. And he came to Kirkwood and so this inspired blind skiing around the US.
Tony Candela: BOLD is Blind Outdoor Leisure Development?
Mike May: Yes.
Tony Candela: And many a blind person, many a person with partial vision has skied downhill because of all these fellows.
Mike May: Yeah, Jean Emir got Ron going who got me going and I've gotten a lot of other people going. The same thing has happened with the technology but it's nice when, I like being on the pioneering end of things and when I look back over my career, I discover that that's what I do best and that's what I like to do, to get things started.
Tony Candela: And it took you and Jennifer a couple of years to fully connect up. Did you get to see each other, other than at the ski resorts when you first met her?
Mike May: No, she had a boyfriend, I had a girlfriend, and so we weren't socializing much. She would just be there for the guiding clinics and when we would have blind ski sessions and that's when I'd see her.
Tony Candela: Was she a ski guide?
Mike May: Yes. She skied competitively in college so she is a great skier.
Tony Candela: What do you attribute your willingness and your ability to go fast downhill to? Is it something that you kinda have to be born with? To be willing to plummet so rapidly, because not everybody feels comfortable doing that.
Mike May: I've thought about that a lot. I'm not sure. I am sure there is an element of curiosity, more than anything, that says, "How fast can a blind guy go?"
And, of course, when somebody says that you can't do it, my mother would be the first one to say, "Tell Mike that. You're bound that you'll see him trying to prove you wrong."
So that's part of it but I really do enjoy the speed and just being in a roller coaster and drop down a steep pitch is enjoyable.
I worked with a coach named Franz Weber from Austria and he held for many years the sighted speed skiing record, about 130 mph and Franz told me once, he said, "You're not crazy as long as you train well, you groom the ski slope, you make sure that everything is really carefully thought out and planned."
So I've got a wife and kids. They don't want me killing myself, going 140 mph. "So let's just do that with you as a blind guy. Let's go to Lezarks, France. Let's find a place that's wide open, make sure everything is safe and..."
Actually speed skiing is a lot easier when you think of it that way, without any gates. It's easier than slalom skiing, just straight, as long as you're willing to go fast. Why not?
Tony Candela: And what kind of feedback do you need to have to feel, [to] stay relatively comfortable while you're going downhill so fast?
Mike May: Well, in most situations in skiing, it's ironic but I don't think technology plays a role in skiing, on a day-to-day basis. And so when we train people, it's with good guiding, loud guides in front.
Tony Candela: In front?
Mike May: Not behind, which was traditionally done.
And when we started in 1982 and we went to the first Winter Olympics for the Blind in Alpine skiing and we won handily three gold medals it was because we were in front and all the other skiers had their guides behind. We changed the way that skiing was done after they saw how quickly one could go with the guide in front.
In speed skiing, the difference is that your ears are covered up because you have a helmet that goes all the way down to your shoulders. You're wearing a lot of protective gear. And so we had to build radios into the helmet and the guide had a radio and Franz would tease that my guide didn't even have to be out there on the slope with me. He could just be in the lodge watching me and having a beer.
Tony Candela: So the decision to go from a guide behind to a guide in front, why was that made?
Mike May: Well, it's part of that pioneering thing that intrigued me. It's like, "How can we do this faster?" With the guide behind you, you can only go so fast and you don't get precise information. Somebody can say, "One o'clock or eleven o'clock." Well, there's a lot of degrees of sway between those two.
So we started having the guide go in front and one realized that a blind person had more control over their own direction, in terms of fine tuning, because you could hear the guide and your ears can resolve a lot more than fifteen degrees of distance. It can be a couple degrees.
So you're much more accurate going based on your hearing than on what somebody else was telling you.
Tony Candela: And the verbal command. I have done some downhill skiing, with the guide behind. The verbal command I have found harder to psychologically make myself react to than my own impression of the environment.
Mike May: Well, of course if the guide's in front of you, you also know that where they're going there isn't a cliff or a tree. So there's a lot of motivation to stay behind them.
Whereas when they're behind you and saying something, you say, "I sure hope they don't get it wrong."
Tony Candela: Including sometimes mistaking left for right.
Mike May: Yeah, absolutely. It happens.
Tony Candela: And that's the ultimate destroyer of trust in your guide, when a major mistake like that is made.
The system of the guide in front, without the radio now. I'm going to guess that's a different experience, with just open ears is a much more natural experience.
Mike May: It's more natural. It's more effective, if, the big caveat is if you have a good guide. And it's hard work for the guide because they have to be looking back, ninety percent of the time, plus looking forward and figuring out if they're taking you in the right direction. That's the tricky part.
So if you just go out and somebody has no experience guiding, it's probably better to have the guide go behind.
Tony Candela: Do you still ski?
Mike May: We ski regularly. We started our boys skiing when they were age 2, and when I think back over the gold medals and the awards I've won in skiing, I realize that the real payoff was in being able to ski with my own kids, and to teach them.
So picture us going down the slope. Jennifer's with one boy, I'm with the other boy. We're only going two miles an hour so you can't really get hurt. Or I'm skiing backwards or with one of the boys between my legs.
We had to work out a system where she was kind of in front and I was kind of following her. And she was attending to one child, and couldn't be really guiding me. So it was great to be able to have this ability and ingenuity to figure out how to do something on the ski slopes that really impacted our family participation.
And our boys are now excellent skiers, better skiers than we are, certainly in terms of... They're kids, so they don't mind jumping off of twenty-foot embankments and not thinking twice about it.
Whereas an adult, you do think twice.
Tony Candela: Do they actually do that? Do they jump off of embankments?
Mike May: Mm-hmm.
Tony Candela: Is there a name for that type of skiing, when you jump off of things?
Mike May: They use the word "air" a lot. There's a lot of fancy names, particularly in snow boarding for these things. But mostly they just talk about, "How much air did you get?"
Tony Candela: Today, this afternoon, one of your boys has a soccer game that you're going to go to.
Mike May: Yeah. Well, that's life these days, for about eighteen years I think. Life is just doing sports with the kids. When I can be involved with them. In this case, I'm watching. But I'm actually videotaping, which is kind of fun. Because I can't always see the detail about what's at the other end of that camera, but I can see enough to point in the right direction. I have fun with that.
Tony Candela: Now Jennifer is a working lady herself. She's an interior designer?
Mike May: Once the boys were five and seven, she went back to work and has set up a very successful business in interior design for high-end homes and businesses around the Sacramento Valley.
Tony Candela: And she gets to see some pretty fancy pieces of real estate, I understand.
Mike May: She does. It's ironic that I married somebody who's an artist and into visual things that have always been a challenge to share with a blind husband. So I'm glad that she can get her fill of visual candy, if you will, in her day-to-day work.
Tony Candela: Has that ever been...without revealing any details about your marital life, I don't want you to feel that you need to do that. But was that something that you guys had to work at, to kind of like accommodate your respective styles of gathering information?
Mike May: I think we do it as a byproduct of getting to know each other. For whatever crazy reason, you get hooked up, you fall in love and you decide you're going to put up with each other's foibles. Certainly the fact that I couldn't appreciate her artwork was a factor. It wasn't any sort of major issue, but over the years I've always liked it when some situation came up where I could appreciate what she'd done or I could at least give her some kudos for that kind of visual artistry.
Tony Candela: Well and since the partial restoration of your vision, I'll get you to describe that in more detail later, have you been able to engage in her visual world a little more?
Mike May: I have. I'm thinking of the time that we went into a restaurant that a friend manages and had just opened and they've done a lot of discussion between our families. They're good friends, about the artwork that was going in there and about the whole décor of the restaurant. Jennifer didn't design it but she was, of course, involved in discussing it.
So when we went there to have dinner for the first time, it was neat that she could point out to me the different pictures, and different lighting and architecture and I could actually see enough to get some appreciation of it. Not as much as a fully sighted person, but enough to participate in a conversation.
Tony Candela: And regardless of whether one can see or not see, there's the matter of, "Do you like looking at all that stuff."
Mike May: Yeah. Of course.
And I have friends that I've appreciated over the years, I'm thinking of in particular this friend in Switzerland who would tell anyone who would listen, about the flowers and the birds and the mountaintops. So she was incredibly good and fun to go hiking with and skiing with because she was always spewing this information about the environment.
Tony Candela: So you do enjoy listening to, and when you can, seeing all of the different kinds of things there are out there to see.
Mike May: I enjoy it and I'm a firm believer that one of the great benefits of not having sight is the opportunity to develop one's mind's eye, one's imagination about the environment, the panoramas and things you would think would be 100% visual can actually be something that you can formulate ideas about and concepts about in your brain quite effectively.
Tony Candela: The ability to create images is an art in itself and to incorporate, if you have some sight, a little bit of sight, that you also have your imagination and you have your other senses and you have your intellect and you use them all.
Mike May: I've always heard when children are small, there's a huge advantage in teaching them imagination by reading to them and not showing them pictures. Because the picture is something concrete and if they're just strictly going based on words, then they have to formulate their own mental pictures, and that develops imagination.
Tony Candela: Before you mentioned your mother. She's an active lady in her own right and still probably does some work for the blind? Is that true?
Mike May: My mother was, is, the driving force behind my pioneering and she's a legend in my life. Certainly a person who gave me the encouragement but also the latitude to do some crazy things and explore for myself.
I'm thinking about when I'm putting up a ham radio antenna and climbing a 70-foot tower and after cautioning me and admonishing me and so forth, she just decided to let me do it. And her solution was to go shopping when I was doing that so she just didn't have to deal with it.
And that's tough for a parent. I realize it now with my own kids, all the potential dangers that they can get into, blind or sighted. My kids are sighted so they still have the potential for getting hurt.
And our society now is so worried about this. We can't just go out on the block and play. I wonder how any of us lived to be adults. And yet my mother let me do these things and wasn't overprotective and I'm so incredibly grateful to her for all of that encouragement and flexibility.
Tony Candela: How about your father?
Mike May: My father was less of an influence. He was an alcoholic, died at age 70, primarily because of that and so his contribution in a perverse way was the fact that I had to be the dominant male in the family and be the responsible one, at an early age, which probably, in retrospect, was a blessing in disguise.
My mother had to go back to work. She went to school and so at age 14,15, I'm looking after other kids and taking on a lot of responsibility. So she really couldn't be overprotective.
Tony Candela: You were an adventurous kid back in those days.
Mike May: I was. There's a fine line between when you get scared off by adventure and when you get turned on by it. And I think one's parents play a big role in how they handle that experience.
If you got hurt too badly, you might be forever paranoid about going out on your own.
Tony Candela: You, in the present day, are the inventor-entrepreneur, is, I guess, a way of saying it. You head up a group called the Sendero Group and have been involved in developing accessible GPS technologies.
What are you doing right now, these days?
Mike May: I'm working hard to establish way-finding technology as something that's commonplace and that blind people can expect and utilize on a day by day basis.
Much in the way that scanning is today, where people take it for granted, having optical character recognition. I would like to see way-finding GPS, getting-around kind of technology, in that same vein. It's not there yet.
But when you think back of where scanning was in the mid-nineties, that's kind of where GPS technology is today. And I think in another ten years, just as OCR evolved, I think that way-finding technology will be just something that is an everyday part of what a blind person needs and uses.
Tony Candela: And your day to day activities include a lot of travel.
Mike May: I travel an awful lot. That's part of being in a small company. Sendero Group is about eight people and it's a compilation of part time and full time people, around the country. A fundamental force in the company that I want to be a part of is being respectful and supportive of the people that you work with.
It works both ways. The people who work for me, and I feel like I work for them. And so we are mostly blind or visually impaired in the Sendera Group and everybody shares the passion that I just described about having way-finding technology that we've enjoyed so much as individuals be easier and cheaper and more convenient and better for other blind people out there so they can travel and get around independently as effectively as we do.
Tony Candela: What type of folks do you have working with you? Are they engineers, software developers? What type of talent do you need to surround yourself with to do this kind of work?
Mike May: We have a wonderful crew and my theory is if I find somebody really good, I'm going to hang onto them, at whatever cost. Wherever they need to go, whatever accommodation they need. Good people are such an incredible resource.
My primary partner is Charles La Pierre, who began this idea of the GPS technology in the early '90s, in fact, and when he was at Carlton University in Canada, in Ontario, he had a thesis project and it evolved into what we have today that's available for blind people.
But back then, looking at the fact that we had global positioning systems and we had some meager databases, how do we put those two things together to develop a way-finding system?
So Charles is my co-founder and on the patent of the GPS technology. And then we have a couple of blind guys who've had previous careers in different fields and have found that technology was really instrumental for them as they lost their sight, in their fifties and they still wanted to have a business and have a career and now a couple of these guys are in their sixties and just loving the technology and how much the GPS helps them get around.
And there's a collection of other people that all sort of fall into those categories or places in between.
Tony Candela: Are any of these folks engineers?
Mike May: Charles La Pierre is an engineer. He's a masters in electrical engineering. A couple of the other guys are engineers, not electrical but one guy's got a mechanical engineering degree.
Tony Candela: Have you had to engage people, let's say, who were experienced in cartography as part of the development of the technologies, mapping technologies?
Mike May: We've been more involved with people on the orientation and mobility side of mapping vs. the actual professionals in the cartography field.
What we try to do is to the greatest extent possible, use commercial technology therefore we license maps from major map suppliers and we don't do anything to those maps. They just come to us, we plug them into our product and that's where Charles's ability as an engineer and a visually impaired person he understands some of the issues that are different for a blind person, using the maps vs. a sighted person.
But in terms of the map data and the GPS receivers, we just use off-the-shelf tools that would be available to any GPS mapping company.
Tony Candela: Have you run across philosophical debates regarding the use of this technology among blind people themselves, people who don't believe in this technology vs. people who do or has it been pretty unanimously in favor of the use of this technology?
Mike May: Well, since we're all different and individuals and have many opinions, of course there is controversy. It has coalesced a little bit more into generally favoring way-finding technology in recent years but previously there was more controversy.
Philosophically, I don't think anybody argues with the fact of getting around and having more information that helps you get around better is a good thing. How to deliver that information is of course of great debate.
And if you deliver that information in such a way that it takes away from other aspects of getting around, then of course that would raise some red flags.
I'd say probably the biggest challenge and point that people raise when it comes to this kind of technology is the cost. Because they'll raise, various people will raise various issues when I give a presentation about the GPS they'll say, "What about the accuracy and what about this point and that point," but at the end of the day if I say, "If I gave you one of these, would you take it?" They'll say, "Of course." "Would you use it?" "Of course."
So the price is why they have to do this cost-benefit analysis because they're in a way almost trying to justify why they don't have it, for other reasons than financial. And when it really comes down to it, it's usually a cost factor, which is probably, these days, 2004, funding is probably the biggest obstacle to accessibility and no longer the technology. That wasn't true ten, twenty years ago.
Tony Candela: But the devices themselves and the point you made earlier about some people might weigh a factor if there's a cost to using the technology in the sense of interfering with some other information one gets while one is in the environment, then that would be something they would weigh into the calculus.
So if you have to listen to all these signals, let's say, or verbal data coming at you from your GPS technology, it might interfere with your listening in the environment, for example.
Mike May: Yes. Certainly the audio feedback is something that people consider. The weight, the fact that you have to have something on, and that's much more linear. That's evolved over time where we had a 15-pound unit in 1995 and we have a 3-pound unit in 2004.
We've also evolved software so that things happen more automatically and the person doesn't have to be pushing so many buttons. Users have given us feedback, now that we've had a product out for many years, where they've said, "Here's the information that I really want to have. This is what I want to have happen automatically and this is what I need to access manually."
So when we make the machine-user interface more transparent, people are happier. It's not transparent completely but more transparent is a good thing.
And a braille display is very helpful because that is a way that a blind person can subtly review the information. It helps in a noisy outdoor environment to be able to read braille. But also from a cognitive standpoint, we think about sitting in a car and carrying on a conversation. If you had an earphone in and you were listening to announcements about nearby businesses and the streets you were on, that would be much more distracting than when the braille pops up on the display and you're reading essentially with two different brain channels. One is tactile and one is auditory for the conversation you're carrying on.
Tony Candela: Currently, the device that someone would have in their hand, as it were, while one is using the technology is something like a BrailleNote device. Is that correct?
Mike May: The BrailleNote is the product that we've developed around at this point. We hope to expand to other personal data systems. For several years now, the BrailleNote has been the dominant PDA, taking over from the Braille and Speak products. Now that there are other options and more coming out on the market every day, we'd really like to see users of all of those different devices, have an option for GPS.
Tony Candela: Are there, in the works or on the horizon, are there devices that are, some larger than others, some smaller than others. Reason for the question is, do you find that people already long for the little devices that a sighted person can hold in the palm of their hand, carry on a hike, that's not the $4,000 type of device?
Mike May: People of course would love to have a device be as small and as cheap and as powerful as possible. And so we keep looking at how to accomplish that. At the same time, looking at the tradeoffs. When you make a device smaller, you gain in one respect but you lose in another respect.
For example, cell phones. They get smaller, it's hard to feel the buttons. And it's very much the same with a GPS unit. You get a smaller unit, you are bound to lose some functionality because the units that people carry around hiking might only have points of interest but not street data.
Now there's no question that the commercial market is able to offer more functionality, cheaper and smaller than when you're using an adaptive device than we can achieve. And so what we're trying to do is provide a Cadillac kind of product that's running on the BrailleNote and then eventually on some other PDAs, but at the same time, looking at the other end of the spectrum, how can we have a small, lower-featured, cheaper option and that I really think will be on the cell phone.
The cell phone is so ubiquitous and it's such an obvious way to deliver information auditorily that this is really where we're going in terms of our future development.
Tony Candela: Is it possible to let's say carry the PDA in your backpack and have the cell phone bluetooth-connect to your PDA for those lesser-feature types of information that you might want to get. So then you could actually have the device but it would be securely put away and you could always pull it out at any time? Is that a technical possibility to do something like that?
Mike May: It's very technically possible today. And this isn't science fiction two or three years from now. The cell phone and the PDA serve different functions, you need them at different times.
So I see, and where Sendera Group is going with this is that there might be a situation where you walk down to the store, you've been there a million times, you don't care about the points of interest in between. You just grab your cell phone and you go. And maybe while you're out there you decide, "Oh I want to go have some lunch. I don't remember what restaurants are around here." So you get on the cell phone and say, "What are the points of interest nearby." And the GPS cell phone tells you. That's nice and simple.
Another situation, I might be in a car and I have the PDA and I want to have more of a narration and I want to calculate a route and I want to do things that are more complicated. Then I use my PDA for that.
And the two devices can certainly compliment each other, be interchangeable, in fact use the same GPS receiver for both the cell phone and the PDA.
Tony Candela: Do you ever worry about the fact that it's all dependent upon satellites up in orbit?
Mike May: No.
Tony Candela: Why don't you worry about it?
Mike May: The satellites have never gone down in the 20 years that the system has been available for civilian use and there's huge commercial incentive now, in the private sector but also in the military sector to keep those satellites up.
People raise the question from time to time, "Will they shut off the civilian signal because of national security reasons?" And there's so many other ways to direct terrorist type of weapons that shutting down the GPS system wouldn't necessarily solve the problem and there are so many people, from commercial fisherman to people in Avis Rent-A-cars using this technology that there would be a huge flap if they shut off the satellites.
We really think more, on a day-to-day basis, of how can we improve the accuracy, so that when you're in places like Manhattan you don't have the urban canyon effect, where you're blocked by 100-story buildings on all sides. That's more of a day-to-day issue and that's the kind of thing that we're working with and tracking other technologies in order to address that issue.
Tony Candela: How long do you see yourself working in this line of product? You're almost 51 years old now. Do you see this as the thing that you want to keep doing for the rest of your life?
Mike May: I think that the getting around aspect of technology is where I have a place for many years to come. I like to believe, I firmly believe that what's around the corner five years from now is obscured. And I like that fact. I always like to look back and say, "Now five years ago would have I pictured myself where I am today, with the circumstances I'm in?" And as long as I can look back and say, "No, I couldn't picture that," then I feel more confident about the future because I want it to be an adventure and a mystery.
Right now, to the best of my ability, I picture myself working in this company in way-finding technology for many years. There's a lot of room for development. Between the cell phone technology, indoor navigation, and seeing how this can coalesce with the commercial sector where there's also a lot of demand for this kind of functionality for sighted folks. I think there's both a business and an emotional aspect of being involved in this industry that will serve me for many years to come.
Tony Candela: Does this type of technology run counter to or perhaps compliment Talking Sign technology that people have been developing for years?
Mike May: Well, there's a fundamental aspect of the system that we've developed and I think it's applicable to the way-finding technologies that will be successful in the future. And this doesn't necessarily apply to Talking Signs. And that is being infrastructure-independent. Now these things can always change, but thus far having to modify the infrastructure is hugely expensive and an overwhelming undertaking and I commend the Talking Sign folks for making as much headway as they have. It's a great technology and it has a specific place and time where it works and where it can be afforded it's great.
As much as they've done with it, we don't see it in every building everywhere. A GPS technology can be anywhere. Now it's not as specific as a talking sign so in the current combination of technology, I'd like to see the GPS get you to the building and the talking sign points out to you exactly where the door is or where is the restroom inside.
So that's a way that the two technologies can actually compliment each other. It depends what happens with other types of indoor navigation over the next five years as to whether or not talking signs will prevail as a way of navigating inside and in transit terminals and so forth or some other cheaper technology that is infrastructure independent will evolve.
Tony Candela: Do you know of any technology like that that might be on the drawing board right now?
Mike May: It's not only on the drawing board but it's getting close to being released, probably in the middle of 2005, maybe later. But the military of course is driving the evolution of indoor navigation, in the form of dead reckoning. And there's been a number of products out for several years and they have a lot of drawbacks. But when those drawbacks can be addressed, then all of a sudden the technology is not only being used worldwide in the military who have funded the development, but then it starts creeping into uses like firefighters and blind people and things like that.
Tony Candela: When they use the term "dead reckoning", what do they mean?
Mike May: Dead reckoning means that your position is being determined based on where you move, how far you step, which way you turn. So it's not established by an external source the way that a GPS satellite establishes a position outside the GPS receivers. This is based on where you start and then everything relative to that starting position.
So for example, the way this technology is now working and the prototype we already have adopted to the BrailleNote, is the GPS receiver is tracking my position to the building. Then I walk in the door and at the point that I go in the door the GPS hands off to the dead reckoning device.
That device consists of accelerometers, gyros, barometers, various motion detectors. And it now is keeping track of every time I turn a little bit to the right or the left, every time I step forward. It has analyzed my stride with the GPS outdoors, so once I'm inside, it's assuming when I move, how far I move.
We then have to have a database loaded for the indoor navigation. Those databases are not yet available. Eventually we'll see them develop just like street maps developed outside. This needs to happen inside.
At the moment, for testing purposes, we're recording our own maps, dropping an electronic crumb at the elevator, at the stairs, at the bar and wherever else we want to find our way back to. And it's working pretty well. I've used it in an airport, in the Chicago airport and it was a long way between the B concourse and the C concourse and the different gates and if you have to quickly find a restaurant that's in between and grab a bit to eat as you have to these days, it's really nice to be able to go straight to that place and not have to ask a whole lot of people for directions.
Tony Candela: Do you have a background in engineering yourself?
Mike May: Well, I do and I don't. I started out at the University of California, Davis in the Electrical Engineering program in 1971 and I lasted for about two years. And it was really hard dealing with all the calculus and the physics and I got through all of that stuff.
Tony Candela: And at that point you did not have any usable vision.
Mike May: I was doing things strictly with braille and tapes and by hook or crook. And I had great support but I also had a lot of interests in other fields. I was on the wrestling team, I liked music and girls. Engineering was too rigid for me.
So I bailed out of that program and found myself needing a degree and I chose Political Science, in order to just get out of the University, at some point.
So I had this foundation in engineering and as a ham radio operator in high school, I always loved button pushing. So I think of myself as a button pusher and as my career evolved over the years, I found that I had a good ability to communicate with engineers, because I was interested in all the techie details. I didn't have the programming, the professional training that they did, of course, but I could speak their language and I could understand it and that helped a lot in product design.
Tony Candela: Political science is a rather major change from engineering. Did you enjoy the political science?
Mike May: What I liked about the political science was I had moved into International Affairs. That was my specialty and that's what I got my Master's degree in.
And the aspect of International Affairs that's most intriguing is the ability to deal with different cultures and to accept the fact that because we have one perception of how things should be is not necessarily what works in another place.
And oddly, you can also, maybe not so oddly, you can put blindness into that category of another culture, a sub-culture within the US or any other country. And so I see how I evolved into the blindness field over the years the same idea of being accepting of different cultures also transcended being accepting and trying to teach people how to be accepting of blindness, within our own culture.
Tony Candela: Where did you get your Master's degree?
Mike May: Johns Hopkins in Washington, D.C.
Tony Candela: When you got your Master's degree, did you go to work in some related field?
Mike May: I did. On a lark, I interviewed for a position with the Central Intelligence Agency and being in Washington, D.C., in the midst of everything, some people thought that was an awful thing to be doing.
I was two blocks away from where the CIA was accused of blowing people up in 1973. And so it wasn't necessarily the popular thing to do. And I just thought, "Well, see what happens."
Eventually I got hired and found it to be a fascinating experience to be on the inside learning about how an agency or bureaucracy works and being part of it. And I was a political risk analyst on Africa, for about a year and then I realized that it still was a bureaucracy, it still was the government and that didn't suit me in terms of being creative and pioneering anything. I was just going to work my way through the GS schedule, like anybody else, and that wasn't too exciting.
Tony Candela: Was this your first job?
Mike May: It was my first real job and it was my first introduction to technology. The CIA was amazing in this regard. Because once they hired me, and it was a convoluted process, between being the first blind person they had hired and the whole Top Secret security clearance business. It took a long time to get in the door.
Once I was in the door, Admiral Turner, who was the Director of Central Intelligence at the time said, "We will make you successful. You tell us whatever you need. Our resources are at your disposal."
So they had two programmers that wrote a Grade 2 braille translation program for me. There wasn't one at the time. This is 1978. They wrote one to go on their computer system and most of their Political Risk staff were not doing any sort of computer screening of information.
And when you picture being involved in analyzing reams and reams of printed material daily, the only way to do it effectively, as a blind person, is with a computer. So they also wrote a computer program to screen the information that came in through covert and overt channels, for the countries that I was involved in. I would get the data on a computer and that computer would dump it out onto a Triformations LED-120.
(End of Part 1 of 4)
