Envision Glasses: AI Augmentation for Vision Impairment

Had been expecting smart glasses to address visual impairment problems, now finally an example.

Envision brings AI to Google Glass to help visually impaired users see
By Jeremy Horowitz in Venturebeat

Google Glass might not have made the best impression when it first came out years ago, but the concept of a glasses-sized computer with a small screen, camera, and speaker had promise, particularly for specific applications. Today, Envision is debuting Envision Glasses, an AI-powered augmentation of Google Glass that can help visually impaired users “see” their environments.

Envision Glasses are a complete solution, combining Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2 with OCR and computer vision software to identify what’s in the wearer’s environment, then speak it out loud using Glass’ built-in speaker. Instead of holding up a smartphone and using its camera and software to read signs or identify people — the experience in Envision’s Android and iOS apps — the company has made the same AI technologies accessible from lightweight glasses frames, dramatically improving the real-world recognition experience for blind and low-vision users. ... "

OrCam for Visual, Hearing Impairment

Basically a navigation aid, which could have profound assistive effect, but implies it must be taught specific contexts to be most useful.  How hard that is to do, or how error prone, is unclear.  Positioned as 'Personal AI' .  Available now.   Their site.

Glasses talk, ears focus, in OrCam's tech showcase    by Nancy Cohen , Tech Xplore

OrCam Technologies at this year's CES made a name for itself as solutions bearer for wearable assistive technology. They have developed wearable aides for hearing and for reading. These make use of computer vision and machine learning technologies.

Prof. Amnon Shashua, OrCam Technologies Co-founder and Co-CEO, talked of "wearable, personal AI" and "AI as a companion."

First, there is OrCam's vision device called OrCam MyEye 2. TechCrunch described the OrCam MyEye 2 as a tiny device "for people with visual impairment that you clip on your glasses to help you navigate the world around you."

It has features that include the identification of consumer products, colors and money notes, said The Jerusalem Post, which described it as the size of a finger. It involves interactive reading/natural language processing as well as orientation (mobility and object identification, said the article.... " 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OrCam_device

Assisting Visually Impaired Web Browsing

Screen reading plus voice assistance.   Good idea.

New Tool Makes Web Browsing Easier for the Visually Impaired 
University of Waterloo News
August 20, 2019

Researchers at the University of Waterloo in Canada, the University of Washington, and Microsoft have developed a tool that merges the best elements of voice assistants and screen readers to make free-form Web searches easier. The VERSE (Voice Exploration, Retrieval, and Search) tool allows people with visual impairments to get Web content quickly and easily. VERSE adds screen reader-like capabilities to virtual assistants, and allows other devices to serve as input accelerators to smart speakers. The researchers surveyed 53 visually impaired Web searchers, and found that more than half used voice assistants multiple times a day. Said Waterloo researcher Alexandra Vtyurina, "If people need more information, they can use VERSE to access other search verticals, for example, news, facts, and related searches, and can visit any article that appears as a search result."  .... " 

An Image Trove

Reminds me of situations where I needed visual data examples with metadata and could not find them.

A New Data Trove Could Teach Computers to Tell Blind People What They Need to Know  In CACM

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) are publishing a database of 31,000 images along with questions and answers about them, and challenging the machine-vision community to use this dataset to train machines as effective assistants for those with visual disabilities.

The dataset comes from the VizWiz application designed by Carnegie Mellon University scientists to help the blind.

The UT Austin team analyzed photos collected by VizWiz, and then presented the images and questions to Amazon's Mechanical Turk workers to supply a short-sentence answer.

A preliminary analysis of the data offers unique insights into the challenges machine vision faces in providing this kind of assistance. .... "