Smart glasses for the blind

London: Smart glasses that could transform the lives of blind and partially sighted people could be made available as early as 2016. The glasses pack a compact video camera mounted on the frame, a tiny image processing unit and software, which turns nearby objects into images on the lens.

Basically, images are processed and projected onto transparent electronic displays, where the glasses’ lenses would normally be.

The joint project, which will first create 100 pairs to test on 1,000 people, is between the University of Oxford and the Royal National Institute of Blind People.

The idea had won a £500,000 grant in a Google charity competition. The makers hope to make the device available at around £300 "The idea of the smart glasses is to give people with poor vision an aid that boosts their awareness of what’s around them – allowing greater freedom, independence and confidence to get about, and a much improved quality of life," Dr Stephen Hicks of the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Oxford, who is leading the development of the glasses, was quoted as saying in the Daily Mail.

According to the report, the glasses don’t replace lost vision but assist with spatial awareness and this will also be the first large-scale test of smartglasses and augmented reality for sight enhancement worldwide.