Author: Samantha Cui

Project name : OrCam Myeye 

Partner: Shenshen Lei

Presentation Slides: Here!

For this research, we decided to focus on the visual recognition technology I talked about last week. While doing research, we tried to focus on finding some projects designed to help people using this technology. Then it suddenly hit me, what if this technique could be used to help the visually impaired? Then we started focusing on this field and did some research. And we found a project called OrCam Myeye.

OrCam Myeye is a product designed to help the visually impaired people. the product is small. It’s wireless and it can be easily installed on the user’s glasses. Through visual recognization, the OrCam Myeye can detect where and what the user is looking and pointing. And then it would use a speaker to output what it saw. The visual recognization is a big step in helping the visually impaired. Since they have trouble seeing things, this would be their second pair of eyes.

While learning about this product, we found that there could be more improvement to this product so that it would be more convenient. One of the improvements we thought is that it could add a pupil tracking technique. So people won’t have to point but could just move their eyes. Other is that it could improve the distance of objects it detects. So people could ‘see’ a broader view.

     

The sketch I created is a Dandelion.

How it would work is that the flower is developping more petals  as the time increses. Once it is large enough, the user could click the mouse to create a “blown” effect to the dandelion. And all the petals would disappear. Then it would start drawing a new one all over again.

The main funtion I used is the rotation of a quadrilateral I drew. I filled it with white to look closer to a dandelion. Then I drew its cernter and its stem.  To create the ‘blow’ effect, I just used ‘mousepressed’ and ‘clear’.  

Reading and Video response:

In the article written by Golan Levin and the speech he gave at Ted Talk, he mentioned how the interaction and communication between human and machine are now utilizing more and more human senses. From the basic body movement, the moving of the arm and body, to using facial expression recognizing motions, and now to mouth and eyes. All of these projects contains two parts, the machine, and the human. Whatever technology or project is created, they are created to help human. Just like computer vision technique mentioned in the article, whether its facial recognization or QR scanning payment. All these inventions targets on improving the methods we use now to make it more convenient. 

Research Project:  Presentation Link

The project I was interested while researching is the Visual lens technique. Several companies are using this technique now and it has helped a lot of people. The one I’ll be focusing on illustrating is the Pinterest Lens.

Pinterest Lens is a function designed to help people search for items using visual recognization. Instead of typing in words and searching what they want to find, now people could just take a picture and thousands of related results would appear. It’s much more convenient.