According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 285 million people are visually impaired worldwide (39 million are blind and 246 million have low vision). Although my personal vision problems aren’t as severe, I know the feeling all too well – waking up each morning to nothing but blurs of color and fumbling to find where I carelessly left my glasses the night before.
Oxford startup OxSight hopes to use augmented reality to help the visually impaired recognize objects and navigate smoothly in their environment. The OxSight goggles have been previously tested on individuals who have a certain degree of vision, but degraded over time. By amplifying the level of light, movement, and object detection the user sees, the device can provide a greater sense of vision.
This isn’t an invasive device, since the physical hardware doesn’t need to interact with the user’s eyeball or brain to function. Rather, the glasses use a camera system, transparent display, and computer vision techniques. The cameras mimic the way the brain processes three-dimensional space and adds a cartoon-like layer to the wearer’s surroundings.
“So the person can see the world as they normally do, but then in a sense you get an aura on certain types of objects, which say in the dark are really handy for recognizing a doorway or an obstacle or say something you want to avoid,” says OxSight Founder Stephen Hicks. “So we can highlight the edges of that to make them really stand out so that you can really quickly and intuitively pick it up. A lot of these technologies to help people who are blind require a huge amount of learning, like trying to understand the world around them as a sense of sound. That’s just a complex thing that is really difficult.”
OxSight has verified grants from both public and private sources to develop this technology further. As the company moves forward, the team aims to address specific design elements, such as form factor and long battery life.