Most existing assistive navigation tools focus on providing real-time guidance for Blind and Low-Vision (BLV) people, but few support building a holistic spatial understanding of unfamiliar environments before travel. Such cognitive map construction (e.g., knowing that a fountain is south of a tower and west of a hotel) is important for pre-travel planning, yet remains underexplored in prior work. To address this gap, we present Touching Space, an end-to-end system that retrieves map data for a target place and loads it into a frontend interface for exploration. The system combines haptic and audio feedback: users explore spatial layouts through touch and ask spoken questions to a conversational agent during exploration. Touching Space contributes a conversational interface that supports BLV users in building cognitive maps on commodity hardware.
@article{arxiv.2604.14637,
title = {Touching Space: Accessible Map Exploration Through Conversational Audio-Haptic Interaction},
author = {Li Liu and Jiaming Qu and Marc Jowell Bagaoisan and David T. Lee and Leilani H. Gilpin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.14637},
year = {2026}
}