Back in beginning of 2011, I was working on concept of Touch Pad for Blind.
It was unfortunately with no significant progress. Several meetings with entrepreneurs (back then I had no MBA by myself) gave nothing.
Not sure if there is anything like this exist today (I hope that there is), I am still posting parts from a work (with small additions as our world has been changed for good and we have commoditized smartphones and Kinect).
The Concept
Mobile system giving blind people real-time vision abilities by transferring surround environment into a touchpad sensing representation system.
The system contains 3 main modules: