Award-winning assistive technology innovator Envision has announced several new cutting-edge features for its Smart Glasses designed for the blind and visually impaired. Envision Glasses uses artificial intelligence (AI) to extract information from images and verbally tell their wearer what they are looking at.
As a result, the AI-powered glasses enable blind and low-vision users to find personal belongings at home, read documents at work, use public transportation, recognize their friends, and enjoy greater independence, freedom and understand their surroundings. So, it’s no surprise that the AI glasses (available globally) are already changing the lives of hundreds of blind and visually impaired people worldwide.
Envision’s new features include:
- Upgraded text reading with contextual intelligence,
- The addition of new languages,
- Improved Optical Character Recognition (OCR),
- A third-party app, enabling the integration of services to the Envision platform, such as outdoor and indoor navigation.
Karthik Kannan, the co-founder of Envision, said:
Our mission is to improve the lives of the world’s two billion people who are blind or visually impaired by providing them with life-changing assistive technologies, products, and services.
Envision Glasses debuted at the 2020 CSUN Conference and were recently presented in their newest form at the 2022 CSUN Assistive Technology Conference March 16 through March 18. Envision Glasses are paired with an iOS/Android smartphone app when initially set up but generally functions independently from that point on. Their software operates on a Qualcomm Quad-Core processor within the Enterprise Edition 2 hardware of Google Glass.
How does it work? When users need to know what’s in front of them, they finger-swipe the glasses’ right-hand arm to select a mode, guided by speech feedback from the built-in speaker. Once a mode is selected, the wearer double-taps the arm to capture an image, which is subsequently processed by the system’s AI-based algorithms.
Depending on the mode, Envision glasses can:
- Instantly read and speak short bits of text such as street signs (in more than 60 languages);
- Scan longer pieces of text like book pages, then speak them at the wearer’s convenience;
- Make an assistive video call, in which the other (sighted) person verbally guides the user by viewing a real-time feed from their glasses;
- Search for a specific object or person, with a beep signaling when that object/individual is in front of the glasses’ 8-megapixel camera;
- Identify different colors (a helpful feature for buying clothes or doing laundry);
- Describe the scene in front of the wearer (such as the presence of a park bench or a tree).
Stuart Beveridge, a blind man from Fife, Scotland, who regularly uses the glasses, praised the assistive video call feature. “The video calling feature, for me, is what sets these glasses apart from any other wearable technology on the market,” he said.
Beveridge details a scenario as an example of its value:
I recently called my sister, who lives quite a long way away from me. She’s in Edinburgh, and I’m in Fife. She could see everything through the camera on my glasses, whatever I was looking at. Between us, we managed to organize all the tins in my kitchen cupboard.
Finally, Envision Glasses are also IP53 water-resistant, weigh approximately 46 g, and can run for about four to five hours per charge from their lithium battery. They are available at a price of about US$3,607 (€3,269) from Envision via its Netherlands-based manufacturer.
