Vuzix claims it has delivered “vastly enhanced vision” to a Pennsylvania high school student, via its Vuzix M300 smart glasses.
Alyssa Baxter was born with optic nerve hypoplasia, a condition in which many of the person’s optic nerves are undeveloped, and, in order to read or write, the person must move their face a nose-length away from the paper or computer screen. However, despite her faulty vision, Baxter is an avid reader and is handwriting her first book.
In several classrooms, the school district has installed desktop-sized camera-monitor rigs so that Alyssa can see what’s happening in the front of the room; however, it’s been financially impractical to place the units in all the building’s rooms. The smart glasses installed with Cyber Eyez, a visual aid software application from CyberTimez, offers a number of features that Baxter and others with visual impairments could find useful, including read-aloud text, object and color recognition, barcode scanning for product recognition, and even a “mood ring” setting that allows the wearer to know someone’s expression.
The smart glasses also allow Baxter to zoom in to read text up to a 15x magnification. The ultimate goal is for these smart glasses to replace the bulky classroom set-ups and enable Baxter and others to see better either near or far, anywhere they go.
