Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
[MUSIC PLAYING]
ERIC BERDINIS: So my friend, Jeff Kiske, and I built a belt
that blind people can wear.
It's much like a backup sensor on a car where a car backs up
and you start hearing beeps.
So this belt has a camera that faces front and detects
obstacles in the blind person's path.
And as they walk around, instead of beeping, you feel
vibrations along the side of the belt.
So if there's an obstacle in the blind person's path, let's
say on the left hand side, you'll feel vibrations on the
left hand side.
And as that obstacle gets closer, the
vibration gets stronger.
So this essentially replaces a walking cane or seeing-eye
dogs in a way that lets blind people or people who are
visually impaired walk around through the streets of society
without being--
no one can really tell if they're blind or not.
They don't stick out.
And it's much more of a subtle way of
integrating into society.
To be honest, doing what we did 10 years ago would have
been impossible.
Everything we learned was pretty much from the internet.
There was a lot of stuff we brought in from the class that
we were taking at the time.
But everything that went into this project was completely
the internet.
For the prototype, we actually used the Microsoft Connect to
do the camera and the depth processing.
And all the drivers for the Connect that helped us detect
the depth data and turn that into vibrations, all that came
from open source software online.
So without that, we would have actually been nowhere.
We ordered all the parts online.
Everything we learned about how to use these different
items together all came from the internet, and barely any
of it came from school to be honest.