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Trekkies rejoice! We are only a few years away from seeing a real-life Geordi La Forge. Recent reports say that Dr. Stephen Hicks of the University of Oxford is working on a pair of glasses that could restore sight to the blind. What does this have to do with videogames? Well, apparently the design of the glasses was inspired by the Kinect. Heck, at this point the Kinect may be doing more for medical science than it is for gaming. The glasses would only work for people who can detect light but can’t actually see. They would use cameras mounted on the corners of the lenses to gather information about the wearer’s surroundings. This information would be sent a tiny cell-phone sized computer, which would interpret it and send signals to an array of powerful LEDs inside the lenses of the glasses. The LEDs then light up in patterns that the blind person could detect, even without “seeing” them. They would then be trained to interpret these patterns as information about the world around them. 
The glasses could be ready for public use as early as 2014 and would retail for £1,000, or approximately 1,600 U.S. dollars. Hopefully it will look as cool as Geordi’s visor. |