Envision Glasses, which are equipped with a camera and powered by AI, capture images of text and turn it into audio, recognize familiar faces and can help users navigate inside and outside.
It could be reading a sign at a train station, a printed document or the words on the back of a teabag. In a social setting, they may help with recognizing familiar faces. In a new place, a person can have their surroundings described aloud.
Whatever the scenario, smart glasses created by the AI-assistive technology company Envision are designed with the aim of helping blind and visually impaired users better process text and take everything in, said Karthik Kannan, co-founder of Envision.
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Envision Glasses are equipped with an 8-megapixel camera—to capture images with about 8 million minute squares per inch— and have a wide field of view, so no detail is missed. The glasses have WiFi and Bluetooth capabilities to stay connected, battery life of about five to six hours and a built-in speaker with USB audio (as well as Bluetooth audio). Even with all the hardware, they’re lightweight, at less than 2 ounces—and the company has been busy adding even more features.
Earlier this month, Envision, which has offices in The Hague, Netherlands and Anaheim, California, unveiled new functionalities for its smart glasses. Those include greater optical character recognition (OCR), improved text reading and the addition of new languages. Envision added Hindi, Japanese, Chinese and Korean, which can be accurately captured and read offline with the smart glasses. That brings the total number of languages supported when offline to 26, and the number of languages supported when connected to the internet to more than 60, according to the company.
Envision Glasses are a tool that helps people who are visually impaired to access the visual world around them, Kannan said in a Zoom call to demonstrate the smart glasses.
No matter what is in front of a user “be it text, be it faces of friends and family, be it objects – it takes that visual information and then converts that into audio,” he said.
To demonstrate, Kannan takes a document in hand to show how the glasses lock in the image and process text in context, recognizing parameters and subheads. That’s done so a person can scan a document, and then closely read a specific section, for example.
The glasses guide Kannan through how to position the document so that it can be captured in the visual field and read aloud. When he intentionally moves the document out of the frame, he gets instructions—like to move the document up or his head down—to help him move it back in the visual field. Whether reading a newspaper article laid out in columns, a road sign or restaurant menu, Envision Glasses decipher layout to make reading easier for the user, according to the company.
Envision Glasses currently works with Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2, and with the upgrades users can more easily access specialty services like indoor and outdoor navigation. The smart glasses company is also now allowing developers to build on its platform to provide additional features for users. With the addition of the Cash Reader app, for example, Envision can now recognize banknotes in over 100 currencies.
The company is also eyeing making the newly updated glasses more accessible for a global market of 2 billion people who are blind or visually impaired. That includes seeking ways to get the glasses, which cost $3,500 with the companion Envision app, reimbursed.
“In the U.S., we’ve partnered with state agencies and rehabilitation centers to fully or partially reimburse the cost of the glasses,” Kannan said. “We’re also working with distributors across the U.S. to best help customers get access to this technology at a reasonable price.”
Other companies also offer smart glasses for the visually impaired. One chief competitor, OrCam MyEye 2, is a smart miniature, wearable device that reads text aloud to people who are visually impaired or legally blind, according to the company.
But no matter who wins in the marketplace or whether it is big enough to support multiple players, one thing is certain: There are tech options that help people with limited vision to live independently.
Envision Glasses can do just that and ensure that people who are blind or visually impaired don’t have to constantly rely on others for everyday task support, Kannan said.
“Users across the world use them to read letters, books (and) office documents in over 60 different languages,” he said. “They use it to recognize faces of their friends and family and even make video calls from the glasses.”
