'See' sounds around you with these eyeglasses for the hard of hearing
For the hard of hearing, getting around without audio cues can be a challenge. Sudden noises can alert you to things happening in that direction, and allow you to react faster to them.
A new design idea translates these audio cues to visual ones, via a set of eyeglasses.
Inspired by shoot-em-up video games, which typically show a red glow in the direction from which an enemy is shooting at you, these glasses will light up at the edges when they detect sound in that direction.
They'll work kind of like this:
If you're familiar with first person shooters, you'll recognise the flashing lights as damage coming from enemies:
The light accessory, called Peri, can be clipped onto existing glasses, and comes from a group of students at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD).
While it's still in a rough prototype phase, Peri's design was so good it won the engineering design James Dyson Award at the national level, and will represent Singapore for the international shortlist in October.
Pavithren Pakianathan, the team's leader, told Mashable the design took about four months from inception to the current build. They decided to make it a clip-on for spectacles, in order to keep costs low for users.
The accessory includes four microphones to be attached at the corners of the eyeglasses, and can be tuned for sensitivity to noise volume. The lights will correspond with the direction that the loudest noise comes from.
The team is working on streamlining the design and making it smaller and more unobtrusive for wearers. Future builds will also be better at picking out sound alerts in noisy environments, as the team works on tuning the system's audio algorithms, according to Pavithren.
A more sophisticated version could also include light sensors, to adjust the brightness of the LED indicators to match the surrounding light levels.
The World Health Organisation estimates there are 360 million people around the world live with hearing loss. An idea like the Peri glasses could improve many lives if it eventually comes to life.
Topics Gaming Social Good
Victoria Ho is Mashable's Asia Editor, based in Singapore. She previously reported on news and tech at The Business Times, TechCrunch and ZDNet. When she isn't writing, she's making music with her band
