Team B3: Scenescribe

While there exists technology to help people with visual impairments when they are on their phones or computers, there has not been much progress in the way of helping these people as they are out in the real world. Canes and other mobility aids do help with identifying one’s surroundings, but we wanted visually impaired folks to be able to perceive more details. Our project is a universal camera attachment paired with a smartphone app. The camera attaches to the user’s glasses and takes photos upon the press of a button on the glasses. These photos are sent to the app, which concisely describes the scene that the camera “sees.” The app outputs this description as audio that can be sent through headphones for the user’s convenience. Our device will mainly be for indoor scene descriptions, as we plan on integrating text-reading (with indoor signs, for example).