Clew

Do you need 3D touch or anything to use this app? I really want to try it but I have an SE

No, you don’t need 3D Touch. It just uses the camera and possibly the accelerometer. Older devices may not perform as well as new ones, but it’s hard to say.

This is a really useful utility. I even tried it in my three room apartment to see if it works but I have tried it on larger places too. Just wanted to test. It is easy to use.

I have an SE too and it works really great.

The app doesn't work for me at all, I tried to retrace multiple routes now but everytime the app failed.

I even tryed it on the same level on my way to the bathrooom, out of my living room, two steps forward, turn right, about 7 steps forward, right again and straight to the door.
The app told me something about straight for 300 feed and up the stairs when I wanted to retrace.
I tried about 5 routes, and none worked.

Hi Everyone,

First of all, thank you so much for your interest and comments on Clew. I am the head of the group that developed this app, and the folks in my group and I really appreciate this useful feedback. We are working hard to improve the app. The feedback given in this thread and in other places is exactly what we need to make this happen. Additionally, we are committed to working with people who are blind and visually impaired to improve the app. In fact, several of the developers of the app are legally blind.

What we are hearing from the community feedback is the following:
(1) We need better in app documentation.
(2) Several people would like translations of the app to other languages.
(3) Folks want to improve the apps performance in outdoor settings. This can be done through incorporating GPS.
(4) The options are currently difficult to find (they are available through the settings menu of the phone, rather than through the app itself).
(5) The most common thing we've heard is that people want to be able to save routes. This is exactly the thing we have been working on over the last several months. Unfortunately, it's actually quite difficult to implement this feature (I'm happy to provide more details on this if folks are interested). I just want the community to know that it's not something that is easy to add.

For more context, I am a college professor at Olin College of Engineering. Olin is a small, undergraduate-only engineering school based in the suburbs near Boston. I've been working on various concepts for indoor mobility using augmented reality technology for the last several years. This is the first app that my group has managed to release.

Please keep the feedback coming. We will do everything we can to act on it and deliver a great app experience!

Additionally, if you have been having difficulty getting the app to work in its present form, I'd love to do a phone call to see if we can uncover the reason any difficulties you might be having. We realize we have a long way to go in terms of documentation and in-app help.

Best wishes to all,
Paul Ruvolo

“(5) The most common thing we've heard is that people want to be able to save routes. This
s exactly the thing we have been working on over the last several months. Unfortunately,
t's actually quite difficult to implement"

analyzing how this app works, i can imagine the difficulty, but there is one thing we can do to make it much more useful: simply save the last recorded route and make it bidirectional.

when one manage to create a route, it should be possible to save the route until a new route is created again. most importantly, the route should be bidirectional. if i am not totally wrong about how this app works, this should be possible.

a simple example: if i create a route from the front door to the back door, i should be able to navigate not only from the back door back to the front door, i should be able to navigate from the front door to the back door, depending on my starting point.

Hi Folks,

Based on feedback from many early adopters of Clew (thank you to all!), we are pleased to announce the release of a beta version of Clew that incorporates many of the suggestions we’ve heard from the community.

The short version of this notice is that you can download a beta version of Clew through Apple’s Test Flight using the link below. Makes sure to read the new help file as a number of things about Clew have changed significantly (or keep reading). Here is the link: https://testflight.apple.com/join/yjuFusW2 to the beta.

Here are the major changes:

(1) By far the most requested feature for Clew is route saving. Clew now supports saving routes. Detailed information on how to save routes is given through the in-app “Help” menu. At a high-level, to save a route you must first anchor your route by positioning your phone in a location and orientation that you can return to at a later time (unassisted) and then activating the “Create Landmark” button. One can think of this position as a “landmark” in much the same way as landmarks are thought of in orientation and mobility courses. It is a place that helps you orient and position yourself within an environment. Good choices for landmarks are vertical surfaces that are easy to find such as door frames, walls, or windows.

To reload the route, you can return to this same location, position your phone as you did when you created the route, and the app will start providing feedback. Many times when navigating along a route, the app will be able to further refine your alignment to the saved route by registering the current environment’s visual features to those that it saw when the route was initially recorded. Since this automatic registration does not happen every time, it is necessary to use a landmark in addition to automatic alignment.

(2) Support for bi-directional routes. Initial versions of Clew only allowed for navigating your route in reverse. Many folks requested the ability to navigate the route in the forward or reverse direction. Support for this has been added. Importantly, we have observed that route guidance is actually more accurate in the forward direction than the reverse direction (especially when loading saved routes).

(3) Enhancements for users with low vision. We have enlarged text and button sizes in many parts of the UI (although, many more changes are in the works to do a better job of supporting users with low vision.). We have also allowed for speech feedback that is not tied to VoiceOver. This means that if you have enabled the voice feedback option, the app will speak directions to you even if you are not using VoiceOver.

(4) Easier to use pause and create landmark procedure. When pausing a route in previous versions of Clew, the user was instructed to place the phone against a vertical surface with the camera facing out and the screen facing the wall. In this configuration the user confirmed that the phone was in the correct position using the volume button (since the screen is not physically accessible in this configuration). We have changed this procedure. Now, alignment is done by pressing the top edge of the phone flush with the vertical surface and the screen facing up. In this configuration, the phone’s position can be confirmed with an onscreen button (which is much more standard). We have also found that this alignment procedure seems to be a bit more accurate than the previous one and is certainly easier to do and comes with less risk of dropping one’s phone.

(5) Sound feedback volume is now tied to the phone’s volume level even if the mute / vibrate switch is activated. This change was made in response to some users who were not hearing sound feedback and had a tough time understanding what was causing this. The reason in many cases was that the mute / vibrate switch was activated. The new behavior is that if the sound feedback option is activated in the app settings, the app will play sounds (provided the phone’s volume is non-zero).

(6) More transparent communication of tracking errors. The previous version of Clew hid most of the potential errors with motion tracking from the user. Now the app communicates errors such as in cases where there are poor visual features in you environment or if the phone is being moved too quickly.

(7) Dropped support for iOS 11. The new route saving feature requires iOS 12 (or higher) to work as well as possible. While a much more basic version of route saving would have been possible with iOS 11, we didn’t feel that it would work well enough to justify implementing it.

We would love feedback on these new features before we release this as an official app update. You can provide feedback through TestFlight e-mail contact or to either of these e-mail addresses (Paul.Ruvolo@olin.edu or clewapp@gmail.com).

As a final note, while the changes above certainly address some of the feedback we’ve gotten from you all, there are still many things we have not had a chance to do (one notable thing is support for other languages). Please trust us that we are working on these aspects of the app and look forward to continually improving Clew for the community.

Known bugs:
(1) The display of metric units got a bit mangled in the current beta build. It is still apparent what is being communicated, but a space was accidentally left out of the text that VoiceOver reads. This is fixed, but I am waiting to upload a new beta build for when we have collected and responded to more feedback from the community.

Again, the link to the beta version that can be downloaded through TestFlight is here:

https://testflight.apple.com/join/yjuFusW2

All the best, and we really appreciate the feedback we have gotten from the community to help us improve Clew,
Paul

clew now has onboard help and the ability to save routes in one direction. My first use without setting a landmark, just a throw-away route worked great! When I started with a landmark, in order to save a route, when I was done and went back to the starting point and ran the saved route, not so good. It had me turning left into a wall about half-way down a hall... They are planning to add the ability to reverse direction with saved routes, which will be good. This app shows great promise to help people who get turned around when navigating indoors.

Wow, this app changes everythin when navigating through unfamiliar spaces. I’ve recommended it to several people already.

Admittedly I've only tried this app once, indoors from here at my desk to the other side of the bed in my bedroom so I'd have several turns to make, but even at the very beginning of my return trip voiceover told me to turn left when I actually needed to turn completely around because there was a wall a couple of feet to my left. I did what I should've done instead of what it directed me to do anyway and from there all the way back to my desk I never got anymore direction.

I listened to the podcast from the applevis site before trying anything and since the podcast was done before the save root option was added apparently the app was slightly different then, other than not following the original direction of turning left and turning all the way around instead what else might be wrong here?

Howwell does Clew work in open indoor spaces? I'm hoping to use it to help me navigate through a space like this. It seems to work well everywhere else I've tested it.