Ocular implants are not the newest technology. The argument I think would be that a phone would be a cheaper alternative/more accessible. But I'm interested if the 'audio cues' that they mention in the video would be any better than the audio cues already present in most environments.

I'm only aware of wildly experimental implants providing like 200 dots of light. They aren't by any means a deployed medical technology.

This sort of system could provide audio cues in any environment. That's already a big step up from 'most environments'.

Combined with something like Tactus [1] and the environment can be represented in a tactile 3d map [2].

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/10/new-tactus-case-concept-bri... [2] http://www.solidterrainmodeling.com/

Well I'd imagine using computer vision that can identify door handles, elevator buttons (even so far as reading out the numbers on the display).