Glasses For The Hearing Impaired?

If you don’t have hearing loss, it is easy to forget just how much you depend on your ears. Hearing aids are great if you can afford them, but they aren’t like glasses where they immediately improve your sense in almost every way. In addition to having to get used to a hearing aid you’ll often find increased noise and even feedback. If you’ve been to a theater lately, you may have noticed a closed caption display system somewhere nearby that you can sit within visual range of should you be hard of hearing. That limits your seat choices though, and requires you to split your attention between the stage and the device. The National Theatre of London is using Epson smart glasses to put the captions right in your individual line of vision (see video below).

The Epson glasses are similar to the Google Glass that caused such a stir a few years ago, and it seems like such a great application we are surprised it has taken this long to be created. We were also surprised to hear about the length of the project, amazingly it took four years. The Epson glasses can take HDMI or USB-C inputs, so it seems as though a Raspberry Pi, a battery, and the glasses could have made this a weekend project.

Augmented reality has been one of those technologies that ought to be great, but the “killer application” for it doesn’t seem to be out there yet. However, if you are hard of hearing, this could certainly be it. It makes us wonder what other things could be done with headgear like this. Speech to text is getting better every day, so maybe glasses that caption real life? We could even see just showing a red bar to indicate the direction of loud sounds might be a handy thing to have.

Of course, you don’t need smart glasses just to get an alert for a loud noise. We’ve even seen Alexa learn ASL.

from Hackaday https://ift.tt/2EgAJ1U
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