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Indian-Origin Engineers create AI Smart Glasses for Visually Challenged (Blind) People

One of the effective tech-wearables that’s been mesmerizing and exploited to the maximum, ever since its arrival is smart glasses. Though top companies like Apple, Google and BMW tease its usage in enhancement of the real world, making things easier to access and manipulate, this company based on Netherlands mastered the utilization of smart-glasses to be helpful for the visually challenged at all means.

Netherlands based assistive technology company – Envision – envisions on accompanying people with no or low vision to see the world deploying AI into the frames.

Founded by two Indian-Origin Engineers, Karthik Kannan and Karthik Mahadevan in 2017, who both are alumni of the College of Engineering, Guindy, Envision recently unveiled its smart glasses that helps the blind people to visualize the world, by reading documents, scanning faces and assisting navigation with the power of AI.

Karthik Kannan (with beard) and Karthik Mahadevan (without beard)

‘Our mission is to improve the lives of the world’s two billion people who are blind or visually impaired by providing them with life-changing assistive technologies, products and services.’

These smart glasses were made to the world at a conference held at California State University, Northridge. On employing AI, the glasses read out the world to the blind person, in short.

Features of the Envision Smart Glass

On wearing the Smart-glass, it captures a wide field of view of the surroundings via its 8-megapixel camera. Envision Glasses then utilizes AI to extract different kinds of information from captured images and now comes optical character recognition (OCR), to interpret tens of millions of data points from images, to speak out the information back to users in over 60 different languages available. The camera has been modified to read texts both digital and handwritten texts from any surface.

Descripting the world, the glasses also proffer color detection, light detection, facial recognition and object recognition as additional features. Means, the glasses can pick out black shirt out of the shelf, know when a lamp is still on, identify friends and colleagues in seconds and find personal belongings around the corner.

Running on Qualcomm quad-core processor, the smart glass has WiFi and Bluetooth capabilities, which keeps the user connected. Also, it has a built-in speaker through which it reads out and a battery that can last up to five to six hours.


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The glass is light to wear, as it weighs just 50grams and can be operated with a smartphone and independently too. It’s app ecosystem makes it easier for its software to integrate with external services, such as navigation. The glass also recognizes more than 100 currencies with the Cash Reader app.

Besides all, the visually challenged people can have a secure video calling with contacts to get guides when its needed.

Envision’s tech is compatible with Android and iOS systems and can be integrated with Google Glass, as the glasses are already built on the second enterprise edition of the Google Glass.

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Currently, Envision smart glasses are not available in India yet but is expected to go in India. Envision raised $1.56 Million (₹12.1 Crores) of investments as of May 2021 to scale up its vision available worldwide.

Watch the video here!

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