“It’s like a walking audiobook.” 

Creating accessible resources for those with disabilities is important—but new technology is trying to make all resources accessible.

Take a look at the OrCam MyEye 2.0. It’s a small and sleek rectangular box that works best when clipped onto a pair of glasses. It is standout technology that can audibly identify almost anything directly in front of the person wearing the device, whether it be an email, a close friend, or a box of Poptarts.

It may sound simple in theory, but in reality, this device for the visually impaired and those with certain disabilities took more than five years to design and has the ability to revolutionize the accessible technology world, and maybe even beyond.

When a wearer has the MyEye 2.0 equipped, they can place any object with text in front of them and point to where they want to read. MyEye 2.0 will snap a picture through its camera lens, then read the text to the wearer through a small speaker pointed into their right ear. The speaker is not loud enough to disrupt anyone sitting beside the wearer, and based on the demo provided to Techvibes, the camera is remarkably adept at picking up text, even from a photo of an email on a smartphone 

Pointing directly at the text is great if the wearer is partially blind or has full vision, but what if they are completely blind? In those cases, MyEye 2.0 can read the entire document in two different ways: The wearer can manually snap a photo via the shutter button on the device, after which it will begin reading the text. Alternatively, the camera can recognize familiar document shapes, like paper or a phone, automatically capture the image and read it all out loud. The wearer can then skip lines of text with hand gestures, like skipping items on a menu, or skipping paragraphs of an article. All of this takes place locally on the device–no cloud connection software required.

“If you think about how much text you go through on a given day, whether its a phone, a newspaper, a menu, whatever you can think of—imagine being cut off from that text,” says Fischer. “It’s a huge part of your surroundings. The MyEye 2.0 is like a walking audiobook.”

The technology runs even deeper. Yes, the MyEye 2.0 can recognize billboards in the distance and read emails off a phone. But it can even recognize people in front of you, thanks to millions of pictures fed through OrCam’s machine learning algorithms. The device will tell a wearer if there is a man, women or child in front of them, and how many, and can even tell you who they are.

For friends or colleagues, users are able to program their faces into their MyEye 2.0. If the wearer looks at someone then long presses the only button on the device, it will take several scans of their face, then ask for a name. It will then store that person’s features as a data set rather than actual photos and allow for easy recognition—not dissimilar from the iPhone X’s facial recognition scan.

The device can also recognize over half a million barcodes, and store products in the same vein as faces. If that isn’t enough, the wearer can simply raise their wrist as if checking a watch and MyEye 2.0 will let the wearer know the time and date—no actual watch required. 

Although the MyEye 2.0 is agnostic of any cloud computing to operate, it does have a wifi connection for automatic software updates–a massive improvement from its predecessor which relied on memory cards and manual updates. It is also important to note that no personal data collected. Document images are immediately deleted after the image is read, and facial-recognition date is stored locally. 

The tech behind OrCam’s devices spans over half a decade of intense computer vision and AI learning, all developed completely in-house. In fact, the only MyEye 2.0 tech that was not made by OrCam is the actual voicing, which is more or less the “easy part” when it comes to this device.

Source: TechVibes