by Playfuls Staff |
25th May 2006
Visually impaired herself, Elizabeth Goldring, a senior fellow at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies has developed a desktop machine that is designed to help the blind access the Internet and view images. Goldring has spent 10 years and called on the help of 30 fellow students and researchers to develop the $4,000 system.[more]
Goldring has collaborated closely with the machine's inventor, Robert W. Webb, a researcher at Harvard and the Massachusetts General Hospital. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration paid for part of the project. "We essentially made the new machine from scratch," Goldring said. The new seeing machine replaces the laser of the SLO with light-emitting diodes, another source of high-intensity light that is much cheaper.
Alongside this project, the researchers came up with a visual language to accompany the machine, language that is designed to help blind better navigate strange buildings. Just knowing the location of staircases or the arrangement of buttons in an elevator can be enormously helpful to a blind or visually impaired person. The machine, which works in black and white, was tested by 10 visually-impaired people. A color version of this system is currently beiong developpedand should be used in a large-scale clinical trial.
According to the nytimes.com, the researcher has also been using the machine to help her create artwork that she calls "retina prints," impressionistic, digital portraits of the world as she sees it, superimposed on faint images of structures of the retina, her own and other people's.
