Jeff Regan was born with underdeveloped optic nerves and had spent most of his life in a blur. Then four years ago, he donned an unwieldy headset made by a Toronto company called eSight. Suddenly, Regan could read a newspaper while eating breakfast and make out the faces of his co-workers from across the room. He's been able to attend plays and watch what's happening on stage, without having to guess why people around him were laughing. "These glasses have made my life so much better," said Regan, 48, a Canadian engineer who lives in London, Ontario.
The headsets from eSight transmit images from a forward-facing camera to small internal screens — one for each eye — in a way that beams the video into the wearer's peripheral vision. That turns out to be all that some people with limited vision, even legal blindness, need to see things they never could before. That's because many visual impairments degrade central vision while leaving peripheral vision largely intact.
Although eSight's glasses won't help people with total blindness, they could still be a huge deal for the millions of peoples whose vision is so impaired that it can't be corrected with ordinary lenses.
Source: Popular Mechanics
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27 2017, @02:01PM (3 children)
Is anyone else thinking that "legally blind" is a rather strange term? I mean, the obvious opposite would be "illegally blind" — do you get jailed for illegal blindness? :-)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by darkfeline on Tuesday February 28 2017, @03:53AM (1 child)
The opposite would be legally non-blind. The law defines the exact point where a person is considered blind versus slightly visually impaired. Compare with "informally blind" or "romantically blind".
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(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @04:30AM
Or Venetian Blind - the state of not being able to see Venus.
(Score: 2) by gidds on Tuesday February 28 2017, @01:04PM
No, it's not just you! And I'm highly relieved to find it's not just me, either :-)
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