These smart glasses convert words into voice for people who are visually impaired

Credit: Oton Glass

A Japanese company is developing a pair of smart glasses that convert words into voice for those who are dyslexic or otherwise have difficulty reading, as spotted by SoraNews24. The glasses, in development since 2012, have been listed on Campfire, Japan’s version of Kickstarter, with the goal of raising $93,500 in order to sell each pair for around $47.

The Oton Glass are glasses with two tiny cameras and an earphone on the sides. Half of the lens is a mirror that reflects the user’s eye so that the inner-facing camera can track eye movements and blinks.

Image: Oton Glass

Users will look at some text and blink to capture a photo of what’s in front of them, which gets transmitted to a dedicated Raspberry Pi cloud system, analyzed for text, and then converted into a voice that plays through the earpiece. If the system is unable to read those words, a remote worker would be available to troubleshoot. Some of those ideas sound similar to Google Translate, which is already capable of taking a photo and converting it into voice. But to use the app, you still have to take out your phone and swipe over lines of text, which feels somewhat more unnatural than blinking at text through your glasses.

Still, given how rudimentary the tech sounds, if the text recognition system fails to read anything, it’s likely the Oton Glass would just be reduced to people deciphering text. The whole thing could become reduced to a really expensive decoding service.

So far, the company has raised 1,236,500 yen ($11,573.64) on Campfire, which is just 12 percent of its intended 10,000,000 yen goal. The Oton was most recently a third-place runner-up for the James Dyson award in 2016.