Seeing is Believing!

When you have trouble seeing, routine everyday tasks become incredibly difficult and daunting. Up until now, reading aids for the visually impaired and the blind have been clunky text recognition devices or apps high on promise and low on capabilities. This is all about to change with OrCam, a wearable camera-based system that will open up a whole new world to those with sight difficulties.

The OrCam device is a discreet smart camera mounted on the frames of a user’s eyeglasses which allows the visually impaired access to daily activities that the sighted take for granted, such as hopping on the right bus, shopping for food or reading the sports pages of a newspaper! The camera ‘sees’ text, recognizes objects, and ‘whispers’ the information it has identified into the wearer’s ear.

OrCam quite literally understands what you want, whether it is to read a book, find the correct item on a shop shelf, or recognize bank notes. All it takes is a simple pointing gesture. The base unit is smaller than the average glasses case and slips into a pocket or clips on to a belt. The device can read books, signs, labels and even text on a computer or phone. When you point to a sentence, OrCam will start reading. The device uses innovative bone-conduction technology, which sends sound to the ear through the bones of the skull, so you don’t have to wear a cumbersome earpiece. Its powerful computer translates the printed word into audio in under two seconds!

OrCam contains an SoC from Freescale’s i.MX6 quad family. The SoC features a quad-core ARM® Cortex®-A9 CPU to deliver the processing performance needed to handle the massive amounts of data captured by the OrCam product’s visual sensor.

OrCam can’t give people back their vision, but it can give them back their independence.

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