People unlucky enough to have lost their vision typically will learn Braille to read specially printed text with their fingers. But what if you’re blind and just want to go to a local bookstore and browse? There are already screen readers and optical character recognition software, but researchers at MIT are shooting for a solution that will more closely resemble traditional reading. The FingerReader device is a large ring that slips on a finger and features a front facing camera that scans the text that the finger is pointing to. Smart software powering the device recognizes the line of text under the finger and reads only that line.
There are vibration motors on the ring, that are triggered by the vision software, that help the reader keep his finger on the text line while sliding along. The same motors tell the user when he reached the end of the line and helps find the start of the next text line. The technology is still in a prototype stage as the researchers continue to develop it, but we hope it will turn into a real product that will open any book for anyone out there to read. Here’s a cool video demo of the FingerReader:
Project page: FingerReader…