Today in New Zealand almost 1,300 Kiwis have limited vision or are blind. Over 400 of these individuals live in the greater Auckland area and about 60 are children who are enrolled in the only school for the blind for the whole country, BLENNZ Homai Campus in Manurewa, in the greater Auckland area.

I am certain we can fundamentally augment their learning experiences by introducing digital manufacturing (with technologies such as 3D Printing) as a resource to these classrooms, resource centers and, eventually, the homes of blind and limited vision individuals.

For the HackadayPrize2016, we want to focus on three areas:

( I ) Hardware & Sensors - Using bluetooth location beacons paired with Raspberry Pi/ Arduino/ etc as an accessibility gateway for better user experience.

( II ) Developing a better Imaging workflow for capture of existing physical models &

( III ) Software - Developing software to enhance captured volumes (from II above), distributing on a global open source repository and optimizing them for specific 3D printers or AR & VR manipulation