Now here’s a ray of sunshine on a cloudy day. LookTel is an object identifier – you point it at something and it tells you what it is. You can teach it to recognize new objects and by aiming it at a product, the program can tell what it is using real speech and when you need to ID something on the fly, you can stick on an image sticker and read that sticker. It’s more or less a barcode and QR scanner with some image recognition thrown in, but it really could be a boon to those with failing – or failed – eyesight.
The system needs a little more computing power than is available in the average smartphone so you need a local PC to help ID some things.
CrunchGear: LookTel, an app for the blind
(Via Augmented Times – see also their previous post on AR and blindness)
March 29, 2010 at 8:07 pm
I’m imagining one of these programmed with a few — or many — languages, which would make it of immense use to everyone, sighted or not.