Bionic Eyeglasses May Boost Impaired Vision

fangmcgee writes with this excerpt from a University of Oxford news release: "Technology developed for mobile phones and computer gaming – such as video cameras, position detectors, face recognition and tracking software, and depth sensors – is now readily and cheaply available. So Oxford researchers have been looking at ways that this technology can be combined into a normal-looking pair of glasses to help those who might have just a small area of vision left, have cloudy or blurry vision, or can’t process detailed images. ... The glasses have video cameras mounted at the corners to capture what the wearer is looking at, while a display of tiny lights embedded in the see-through lenses of the glasses feed back extra information about objects, people or obstacles in view. In between, a smartphone-type computer running in your pocket recognizes objects in the video image or tracks where a person is, driving the lights in the display in real time. The extra information the glasses display about their surroundings should allow people to navigate round a room, pick out the most relevant things and locate objects placed nearby."

Comments

Bah

[Konster]

No Steve Austin bionic eye sound, no dice. :(

What about shoes?

[Master Moose]

For the upskirt community, a wireless connection between the shoes and the screen in the glasses will be a godsend

Re:What about shoes?

[Roachie]

In my day we used to have to glue mirrors to our shoes, kids these days got it easy.

Re:What about shoes?

[davester666]

Yeah, they have to tape a camera to their shoe instead. And tape over the red blinking light if they aren't a complete moron.

Re:What about shoes?

[Ukab the Great]

And vision-impaired members of the upskirt community will finally be able differentiate genuine upskirts from men wearing kilts.

Interesting concept, two problems

[Sooner Boomer]

...which are: 1) how do you get the signal from the cameras in the glasses to the processor and back to the display, and 2) how do you power them? It seems like you're going to need a fairly high bandwidth to carry visual information from the cameras and back up. Since these are glasses, you'll need to do this over a meter or more, and have to use an extremely flexible data pipe. Maybe some sort of flexure- or motion-powered charger could be used to top off the batteries. This (power) is the single greatest hurdle to overcome in the design of prosthetics.

Focal length

[Seggybop]

I'm very curious as to how they've managed to display information on conventional-looking glasses that the wearer is actually capable of focusing on. Every time a story like this has come up of some group that developed normal-appearing glasses with a display, it's turned out to be vapor or a useless concept mockup. Existing head-mounted displays all involve bulky prisms/mirrors that push the effective focal length of the image far enough out that the viewer can actually see it. If you simply make a transparent display on the lens itself or attempt to project onto it, a human normally can't focus anywhere near close enough for it to be visible, and this has been the most serious problem with any sort of device like this.

over 9000 Geordi's agree

[Reed Solomon]

I refuse to buy one unless it looks like I'm wearing a hair accessory on my face.

blind people have fashion standards to follow, you know.