Assisted Vision glasses use OLED display to help the visually impaired see

Technology is constantly moving ahead. The latest bit, called Assisted Vision glasses, can potentially help users with severe vision impairments with their sight. According to Mashable, the glasses can be worn like any other pair of spectacles, but instead of glass or plastic lenses, they use an OLED display and cameras. This provides vision, both directly ahead as well as peripheral.

You might be wondering how glasses with cameras and displays could help the blind. According to the research team behind the glasses, 75 percent of registered blind people have the ability to detect light. The glasses also have sensors that can gather some extra data, such as a gyroscope, a compass and GPS. The sensors are able to detect movement, direction and location of objects in front of a user. The accuracy of the object detection is within 4 inches.

The Assisted Vision glasses use sensors along with an OLED display

The glasses are equipped with a small chip, which crunches the data sent by the sensors. Thanks to this, objects in front of the wearer will be rendered as a series of lights. The lights are shown through an OLED display, which is capable of showing light in varying colour and intensity.

More from News & Analysis

What is the US HIRE Bill and why is India’s $250-billion IT sector worried? Is the internet dead? What's this theory that OpenAI's Sam Altman says might be true?

Assisted Vision is also bundled with headphones and text-to-speech software which can help blind users get even more information from their surroundings. According to its official website, it can be used to get directions or read bus numbers and signs. The technology has quite a bit of potential, such as for people suffering from cataract or diabetic retinopathy. The team behind the glasses hopes to go into full production by the end of 2014.