Venezuelan engineer creates software to help blind people – El Universal (Venezuela)

The era of white canes and guide dogs may be coming to an end. And it is that a new technological tool could allow blind people perceive the world around them by simply using a glove and a camera. Is a system developed by engineer Carlos Diaz Venezuela as part of its draft Master Simon Fraser University in Canada.

The engineer, graduated from the Universidad Simón Bolívar (USB), designed a prototype software allows blind people perceive the different elements found in the environment without touching them.

To do a 3D camera that captures the elements that the person has used the front, plus a glove that emits vibrations to fingers when the object is close to facilitate its position, spatial distribution and size.

To make his project, Diaz used the Kinect system, developed by Microsoft, which allows users to control and interact with the game console without physical contact, because its interface is able to recognize gestures, voice / sounds and movements of various objects and images.

The engineer said Diaz pictures captured by the 3D camera are processed by a computer to create a three dimensional model of the objects, while the 2D records the position of the glove fingers, which emits vibrations when the user touches virtual models.

“The user has a scanning space in which you can play, interact and virtually penetrate the bodies, learning to perceive, locate, measure, count and differentiate,” explained Diaz, who added that the idea is that in future People walk with his helmet in his hand perceived by vibrations, a tactile image of the environment around them.

One of the benefits of the software is that it could reduce tripping the blind people are exposed daily, plus it would allow them to find objects without requiring help.

The project presented by Diaz had an experimental phase in which a group of volunteers were blindfolded to verify the functionality of the tool and determined that they were able to find different objects and classify them according to their size.

Although this project is experimental period, Diaz sees the device could be further simplified by replacing the hull of the famous glasses -the Internet giant Google Glass-which already includes miniature cameras; while the computer would become the blind smartphone, which should add software that converts images into three-dimensional models.