VISTA: A Multimodal Egocentric Benchmark for Goal-Oriented Perception and Assistance to Blind and Low-Vision Users

Blindness and low vision limit many people's ability to complete daily tasks, motivating AI assistants that provide useful guidance. Yet, existing benchmarks do not adequately test whether vision models can provide effective everyday assistance. In particular, i) existing benchmarks primarily rely on visual and textual inputs, with limited support for other modalities that are increasingly available in egocentric wearable devices such as gaze, inertial measurements, spatial trajectories, and others; and ii) existing evaluations emphasize scene understanding and question answering, with limited coverage of goal-conditioned guidance for blind and low-vision users across everyday tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce VISTA (Visually Impaired Scene and Task Annotations), a multimodal egocentric benchmark for goal-oriented assistance for blind and low-vision users. VISTA contains sim1,000 egocentric recordings captured with Project Aria glasses; each recording provides synchronized sensor streams, six of which serve as model inputs, and three different types of annotation, covering ten task categories (TC), from object localization to hazard detection. We evaluate 14 representative vision-language models zero-shot on VISTA and design a lightweight multimodal model baseline that integrates all six modalities. Experimental results show that, although existing models can often describe egocentric scenes, they remain limited in generating goal-directed assistive guidance. VISTA thus provides a benchmark for evaluating multimodal models that could improve everyday accessibility.