The Oton Glass are glasses with two tiny cameras and an earphone on the sides. Half of the lens is a mirror that reflects the user’s eye so that the inner-facing camera can track eye movements and blinks.Image: Oton GlassUsers will look at some text and blink to capture a photo of what’s in front of them, which gets transmitted to a dedicated Raspberry Pi cloud system, analyzed for text, and then converted into a voice that plays through the earpiece. If the system is unable to read those words, a remote worker would be available to troubleshoot.
The Oton was most recently a third-place runner-up for the James Dyson award in 2016:
There exist similar products in the world, but they are not currently commercialized yet. They require a breakthrough of technology and trial-and-error on how to deploy smart glasses. The originality of OTON GLASS consists of two aspects, technology and deployment. First, in the technology realm, startups such as Orcam Inc. and Hours Technology Inc. are currently developing smart glasses for blind people. They mainly develop powerful OCR for the English (Alphabet) using machine learning techniques. On the other hand, OTON GLASS focuses on Japanese character recognition as its unique aspect. OTON GLASS aims to solve the user’s problems by becoming a hybrid (human-to-computer) recognizer and not approaching the problem using OCR Technology. Secondly, in terms deployment, OTON GLASS is all in one that combines camera-to-glasses – meaning they look like normal glasses. This capture trigger based on human’s behavior is natural interaction for people.