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.
"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
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.
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