Now, an app that magnifies smartphone
screen for low-vision users
NEW YORK: A
team led by an Indian-origin researcher has developed a smartphone app that
projects a magnified smartphone screen to provide better visibility to
low-vision users.
The team from Schepens Eye Research Institute of Massachusetts Eye and Ear/Harvard Medical School designed the app that improves upon the built-in zoom feature of smartphones by projecting the display to Google Glass, which users can navigate using head movements to view a corresponding portion of the magnified screen.
The team from Schepens Eye Research Institute of Massachusetts Eye and Ear/Harvard Medical School designed the app that improves upon the built-in zoom feature of smartphones by projecting the display to Google Glass, which users can navigate using head movements to view a corresponding portion of the magnified screen.
"Given
the current heightened interest in smart glasses such as Microsoft's Hololens
and Epson's Moverio, it is conceivable to think of a smart glass working
independently without requiring a paired mobile device in near future,"
said first study author Shrinivas Pundlik.
"The concept of head-controlled screen navigation can be useful in such glasses even for people who are not visually impaired," Pundlik wrote in the study published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering.
"The concept of head-controlled screen navigation can be useful in such glasses even for people who are not visually impaired," Pundlik wrote in the study published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering.
The
Pundlik-led team developed the head-motion application to address the
limitations of conventional smartphone screen zooming, which does not provide
sufficient context and can be painstaking to navigate.
"When
people with low visual acuity zoom in on their smartphones, they see only a
small portion of the screen, and it's difficult for them to navigate around --
they do not know whether the current position is in the centre of the screen or
in the corner of the screen," noted senior author Gang Luo.
"This
application transfers the image of smartphone screens to Google Glass and
allows users to control the portion of the screen they see by moving their
heads to scan, which gives them a very good sense of orientation," Luo
added.
In an
evaluation of their new technology, the researchers observed two groups of
research subjects (one group that used the head-motion Google Glass application
and the other using the built-in zoom feature on a smart phone) and measured
the time it took for them to complete certain tasks.
The
researchers showed that the head-based navigation method reduced the average
trial time compared to conventional manual scrolling by about 28 percent.
Source |
Economic Times | 25 April 2016
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