CARA & HoloLens Give Objects 'Voices' to Help the Blind Navigate
Caltech researchers have combined augmented reality hardware and computer vision algorithms to develop software that enables objects to "talk." Worn as a portable headset, the technology translates the optical world into plain audio. The team developed a system they call the Cognitive Augmented Reality Assistant (CARA). CARA was developed for Microsoft's HoloLens, a wearable headset that can scan a user's environment and identify individual objects like a table or laptop. With CARA, each object in the environment is given a voice and will "say" its name upon the user's command. This system could be made available in popular public locations like museums and grocery stores to help blind people make their way through unfamiliar spaces.