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Science-Technology Title: "Seeing machine" offers legally blind view of world CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (Reuters) - A legally blind poet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has designed a "seeing machine" that allows people with limited vision to see faces of friends, read or study the layouts of buildings they intend to visit. The device, which MIT estimates costs about $4,000 to manufacture, plugs into a personal computer and uses light-emitting diodes to project selected images into a person's eye, allowing visually impaired users to see words or pictures. "The advantage of this kind of display is there's no extraneous stuff in your peripheral vision that gets in the way," Elizabeth Goldring, who has published three volumes of poetry, said in an interview. "The image gets projected right onto the retina." The device, which Goldring calls a "seeing machine," is housed in a box that measures about 12 inches by 6 inches by 6 inches. The seeing machine is not wearable and would not allow one to easily navigate through a crowded, unfamiliar space. But it helps a user study a color image, such as printed words, pictures of people or room layouts. It only works for people with some living retina cells and a completely blind person would not be able to use the device. It was tested on 10 people with limited vision -- the majority of whom were legally blind, meaning they can see nothing smaller than the large "E" on an eye chart. The majority could see the images and recognize simple words. About 1.3 million Americans are legally blind, according to data from the American Foundation for the Blind. Previous technologies aimed at people with limited vision work like closed-circuit television, capturing an image with a camera and projecting it onto a video screen or video goggles, not directly onto the retina, according to Darren Burton, national program associate for technology at the American Foundation for the Blind, in Huntington, West Virginia. VIRTUAL REALITY In perhaps its most practical application, a visually impaired person can use the seeing machine to study a three-dimensional computer rendering of a room or public place in order to familiarize themselves prior to traveling there. To use the machine, one looks through an eyepiece and navigates through the image using a joystick in an effect similar to playing a video game. Goldring, a senior fellow at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies, said she tested the spatial preview idea by viewing a video of a building on the MIT campus that she hadn't previously visited, then touring the building. The navigation feature would be valuable for people with limited vision, said Burton, who is totally blind. "If I know the area, I'm pretty independent there, and I can tell my guide dog where to go," Burton said. "If I don't know where I'm going, he's not much good." The seeing machine was inspired by a medical device called a scanning laser opthalmoscope, which a doctor had used to examine Goldring's eyes as she lost her vision, a side effect of diabetes. The laser scope can cost more than $100,000. With a grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Goldring and a team of MIT researchers and students have spent a decade looking for ways to cut costs -- by using light-emitting diodes instead of lasers, for instance -- to make it more affordable. With the prototype now working, Goldring's next hurdle is to build a commercial version.
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