Reuters and Drudge have discovered Elizabeth Goldring’s low-budget seeing eye machine, which we blogged about last month… (After, you know, seeing it in the New York Times)…
The device, which MIT estimates costs about $4,000 to manufacture, plugs into a personal computer and uses light-emitting diodes to project selected images into a person’s eye, allowing visually impaired users to see words or pictures.
“The advantage of this kind of display is there’s no extraneous stuff in your peripheral vision that gets in the way,” Elizabeth Goldring, who has published three volumes of poetry, said in an interview. “The image gets projected right onto the retina.”
The device, which Goldring calls a “seeing machine,” is housed in a box that measures about 12 inches by 6 inches by 6 inches.
The seeing machine is not wearable and would not allow one to easily navigate through a crowded, unfamiliar space. But it helps a user study a color image, such as printed words, pictures of people or room layouts. It only works for people with some living retina cells and a completely blind person would not be able to use the device.
Part of Goldring’s goal is to create visual experiences for people with limited eyesight. To that end, her team has created some visual poems, like the one above.
More from Goldring’s MIT site…