AUGMENTED REALITY GLASSES TO HELP THE SIGHT-IMPAIRED

A start-up based at the University of Oxford has developed augmented reality glasses that can help the visually impaired to see.

OxSight’s glasses can’t do anything to help people who are completely blind, but the totally blind are only a small fraction of the visually impaired community. The glasses can, on the other hand, help those who suffer from a wide range of conditions such as glaucoma, retinitis pigmentosa or diabetes-related sight loss. They work, essentially, like glasses on steroids, using front-mounted cameras to see what’s in front of the wearer and then overlaying a computer-enhanced version of the resulting image onto the lenses. Depending on the wearer’s specific condition, they can enhance colours, sharpen up the image so that it looks ‘normal’ when seen by someone with blurred vision, or create a simplified, ‘cartoon’ version of reality that’s visible even to those with severely reduced vision. The glasses were developed by OxSight in association with Royal National Institute for the Blind and the Royal Academy of Engineering, and with the assistance of £500,000 prize money from the 2015 Google Global Impact awards. They pair with a smartphone, which is where all the intensive graphics processing goes on. This means the glasses require little onboard computing power.

Feedback from early users has been extremely positive, says OxSight, and the company hopes to bring the product fully to market very soon. In the meantime, they are looking for more ‘guinea pigs’ – so if you suffer from impaired vision and want to give the specs a try, see smartspecs.co for details.