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posted by on Monday February 27 2017, @01:24AM   Printer-friendly
from the engage,-mr-laforge dept.

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


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27 2017, @03:30AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27 2017, @03:30AM (#472089)

    This sounds like it might help sufferers of macular degeneration. But it is such an obvious application, and wasn't mentioned in the abstract of the article, maybe it doesn't work for that.

    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27 2017, @05:04AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27 2017, @05:04AM (#472102)

      It works also for penile degeneration

  • (Score: 2) by mmcmonster on Monday February 27 2017, @11:10AM

    by mmcmonster (401) on Monday February 27 2017, @11:10AM (#472202)

    Why the heck aren't these technologies more well known?

    I know a lot of people with limited sight. Not quite at the legally blind stage, but some of them are close. Why don't these people know about this?

  • (Score: 2) by choose another one on Monday February 27 2017, @11:17AM

    by choose another one (515) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 27 2017, @11:17AM (#472204)

    ...but obviously not the cinema, because it's a camera

    http://the-gadgeteer.com/2014/01/20/amc-movie-theater-calls-fbi-to-arrest-a-google-glass-user/ [the-gadgeteer.com]

    at some point, tech is going to pit the cinema camera bans against disability discrimination laws, and the guy in TFA would, at my guess, win.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27 2017, @02:01PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27 2017, @02:01PM (#472262)

    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)

      by darkfeline (1030) on Tuesday February 28 2017, @03:53AM (#472654) Homepage

      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".

      --
      Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
      • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @04:30AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @04:30AM (#472665)

        Or Venetian Blind - the state of not being able to see Venus.

    • (Score: 2) by gidds on Tuesday February 28 2017, @01:04PM

      by gidds (589) on Tuesday February 28 2017, @01:04PM (#472758)

      No, it's not just you!  And I'm highly relieved to find it's not just me, either :-)

      --
      [sig redacted]
  • (Score: 2) by Wootery on Tuesday February 28 2017, @11:33AM

    by Wootery (2341) on Tuesday February 28 2017, @11:33AM (#472731)

    Just saw the same thing in another SN article, It Took Less Than a Minute of Satellite Time to Catch These Thieves Red-Handed. [soylentnews.org]

    It's subtle, but drop the 'these' and it instantly seems less like a teaser for a dramatic photo.

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