New smartphone app gives sight to the blind

Inventor Raymond Kurzweil speaks at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Pasadena, California in this July 24, 2009 file photo. A new $99 app, courtesy of Apple Inc is the result of a four decades-long relationship between the National Federation of the Blind and Kurzweil, a well-known artificial-intelligence scientist and senior Google employee.

Credit: Reuters/Fred Prouser/Files

 

(Reuters) - Jonathan Mosen, who has been blind since birth, spent his evening snapping photos of packages in the mail, his son's school report and labels on bottles in the fridge. In seconds, he was listening to audio of the printed words the camera captured, courtesy of a new app on his Apple Inc iPhone.  
 
"I couldn't believe how accurate it was," said Mosen, an assistive technology consultant from New Zealand. 
 
The new app that allows blind people to listen to an audio readback of printed text is receiving rave reviews after its first day of availability and is being heralded as a life-changer by many people. 
 
Blind people say the KNFB Reader app will enable a new level of engagement in everyday life, from reading menus in restaurants to browsing handouts in the classroom.
 
The $99 app is the result of a four decades-long relationship between the National Federation of the Blind and Ray Kurzweil, a well-known artificial-intelligence scientist and senior Google employee. According to its website, K-NFB Reading Technology Inc and Sensotec NV, a Belgium-based company, led the technical development of the app. 
 
Kurzweil, who demonstrated the app on stage at the NFB's annual convention in June, said it can replace a "sighted adviser".
 
Taking advantage of new pattern recognition and image- processing technology as well as new smartphone hardware, the app allows users to adjust or tilt the camera, and reads printed materials out loud. People with refreshable Braille displays can now snap pictures of print documents and display them in Braille near-instantaneously, said NFB spokesman Chris Danielsen. 
 
The app has already given some people greater independence, users said on Thursday and Friday on social-media sites such as Twitter. One early adopter, Gordon Luke, tweeted that he was able to use the app to read his polling card for the Scottish Referendum. 
 
The app will be available on Android in the coming months, Kurzweil told Reuters in an interview. He may also explore a version of the app for Google Glass, a postage stamp-sized computer screen that attaches to eyeglass frames and is capable of taking photos, recording video and playing sound.
 
"Google Glass makes sense because you direct the camera with your head," Kurzweil said. 
 
Kurzweil started working on so-called "reading machines" in the early 1970s after chatting on a plane with a blind person who voiced frustrations with the lack of optical-recognition technology on the market. 
 
A few years later, "Kurzweil burst into the National Federation of the Blind's offices in Washington, D.C., and said he had invented a reading machine," recalled Jim Gashel, a former NFB employee who currently heads business development at KNFB Reader. "It was phenomenal."
 
Kurzweil's first reading machine was the size of a washing machine and cost $50,000. The technology has continued to improve over the past few decades - the new smartphone app can recognize and translate print between different languages and scan PowerPoint slides up to 25 feet (7.6 meters) away - but it was not available on a mainstream mobile device until now. 
 
Previously, it cost more than $1,000 to use the software with a Nokia cell phone and a camera. 
 
The app’s release comes at a time when the technology industry has faced criticism for being too focused on making what some deem frivolous products such as apps for sharing photos and video games, as well as for intruding into people’s personal privacy.
 
In San Francisco, activists have blocked commuter buses operated by companies such as Google and Apple, and picketed the homes of some tech company executives for driving up the cost of living and not doing enough to help fix the city's problems.
 
San Francisco-based Bryan Bashin, executive director of the non-profit Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, said the KNFB app shows the positive and profound impact that technology can have. 
 
“There are innumerable times in life that I’ll have a bit of print and there will be nobody around who can help me out, and I’ll just want to know something as simple as 'Is this packet decaf or caffeinated coffee?'” Bashin said. 
 
“The ability to do this easily with something that fits in your pocket at lightning speed will certainly be a game changer.”                  
 
~ Christina Farr and Alexei Oreskovic

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metaPRO 3D Glasses Promise Iron Man-Like Experience, Up for Preorder

While Google is busy preparing its Glass heads-up display for consumer launch, other device makers are releasing bigger, more...

While Google is busy preparing its Glass heads-up display for consumer launch, other device makers are releasing bigger, more immersive wearable computers. Enter the metaPRO, a 3D augmented reality platform with a screen that's said to boast 15 times the display area of Google Glass.
 
The $3,000 metaPRO, which is now up for preorder and costs twice as much as the Google Glass Explorer Edition, features a design that the company says is based on aviator sunglasses. Meta says the look plays a crucial role in how wearable displays resonate with consumers.
 
We wanted to make it sexy, Meta CEO Meron Gribetz said of the metaPRO . People's faces will be as beautiful as they were before or even more while wearing it.
 
Unlike Google's heads-up display and the Vuzix M100 Smart Glasses, the metaPRO uses a binocular form factor. This means the glasses come with a 720p display for each eye, rather than a single display to be worn above one eye. That's largely because the metaPRO is built to serve a different purpose than the two aforementioned wearable devices.
 
The metaPRO is made for augmented reality, while Glass primarily delivers notifications and brief news headlines. Gribetz tells us that current applications include a 3D sculpting app that lets users build a rocket and launch it or even play first-person shooter games.
 
Since the metaPRO is built to handle more demanding tasks, it features more powerful specs such as an Intel Core i5 CPU, 128GB of onboard storage and 4GB of RAM. The metaPRO weighs about 6.3 ounces, which is slightly heavier than a large smartphone such as the 5.9-ounce Samsung Galaxy Note 3. This wearable headset also comes packed with an array of sensors including dual RP video and photo sensors, 9-axis tracking and an infrared time of flight real time 3D scanner.
 
The metaPRO also differs from Glass in that the primary method of interaction is reaching out and touching holograms with your hands. With Google's device, users must use voice controls or swipe the touchpad along the side of the headset. Gribetz also boasts that the metaPRO's user interface was designed by the same man who created the UI for Tony Stark's J.A.R.V.I.S armor for the Iron Man movies. The software is based on the Unity 3D engine, which the Meta CEO says is among the most widely used platforms among developers.
 
Gribetz didn't give an exact number of apps that will be available upon launch, but said that hundreds and thousands of apps will be released and 1,500 developers have already purchased the kit.
 
In addition to a slew of AR and gaming focused apps, Meta promises to deliver features that take advantage of the eyewear's full functionality. For example, the CEO mentioned that wearers would be able to see what another nearby metaPRO wearer is seeing and would even be able to block out real-world ads using the glasses. The headgear will also launch with fully customizable prescription options -- an issue that other companies such as Google haven't announced official solutions for yet. Gribetz says Meta is looking into providing clip-on lenses in the box for the most common prescriptions, but is also considering asking customers for their prescription when they order the device.
 
While the metaPRO sounds like something straight from science fiction, the truth is it's not the only device of its kind. The Android-based, Atheer One also provides an augmented reality experience in which the user can manipulate holograms in front of them.

~ Lisa Eadicicco, LAPTOP Staff Writer

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