If I was going to wear a small camera in public, I'd be more interested in it finding and reading signs. If someone I know is coming up to me, they can just call out a greeting. Not sure I need a device for that. On the other hand, reading signs (street signs, the note stuck to the classroom door that says "class is canceled", the menu behind the counter, posters advertising campus events I'd otherwise completely miss out on, etc, etc, etc) is much more of a problem. There are already apps that can OCR text, if you know where the text is exactly and can line it up and take a picture. But glasses that could just automatically read text that might otherwise catch a sighted person's eye, even if I didn't know it was there to take a picture and try and read it, would be useful.

This definitely doesn't sound useful in the overall scheme of things when interacting with the world when out and about. As mentioned previously, people we know will just call out to us, and face detection assumes that the user is actively scanning their surroundings in a visual way, something not many of us do. Reading signs and waypoint navigation are much better uses for your skills and engineering focus. Aira has already been working on this and will eventually have an onboard AI personal assistant that will be able to call out specific info without the help of the Aira live agents, utilizing the camera system built into their sunglasses system. A device specific to just facial recognition is a waste of time, but making it utilitarian and taking advantage of your camera system to give us more info about our surroundings would be a lot more well received.

This reminds me of Orcam. I don't like that product as it is very expencive and doesn't have features I like. I am blind and a camra like you and orcam describe would not help someone like me. As people have pointed out, people will talk to us and in doing so, we will know who it is by the sound of their voice.

I have a slightly different perspective then those who have responded thus far. Normally I am very negative about wiz bang specialized hard ware that sighted people make for blind people; however, being able to identify people more easily would really be amazing for me.

I have a very terrible memory when it comes to people’s names. I have actually gotten to know people pretty well, spending a lot of time hanging out with them, while not being able to remember their name. This happened a lot in college; brief encounters were especially annoying, people would come up to me and greet me with my name, and I would not be able to respond with their name. Of course, sometimes I would simply ask them to remind me of their name, but you can only do that so many times. Places like churches are especially bad for me. I have gotten to know people well at churches that I have attended for years, seeing them every week, but not knowing their names. There are so many people that you meet all at once at a church, and it’s just so awkward to ask someone what their name is after you have known them for three months.

Of course, my issue is not entirely realized to being blind. I was sighted for most of my life, and I had this problem to a lesser extent as a sighted person. Just because I was able to see people’s faces did not mean I was able to remember their names. What is more, my wife, who is also blind, has a much easier time with people’s names; she actually helps me a lot now. Never the less, blindness does make the problem harder for me. Without visual info, you just have less to help you remember names.

With all of that said, I’m not sure how feasible this sunglasses idea would be. I would not wear anything that looked obvious, such as Google glass. Blind people are stared at enough without camera’s sticking out of our faces. Also, it seems like it would be pretty hard for a camera to randomly pick up someone’s face as they walked by. I do make some effort to try and make eye contact with people I hear walk by, but I do not do that with everyone, and the face is a pretty small target.

For me, I believe the only tech concept that could help would be voice based. I’m not sure if it’s even possible to have accurate voice id, but I think a phone app that could listen in real time and whisper someone’s name to me, through an earpiece, would be amazing. As people greet me in church, the app could id their voice, give me the name, and I could respond accordingly. As the app runs, it could flag voices that it does not yet know, and record the audio of these new voices, in order to later bring up a list of profiles for identification. That way, when someone introduces themselves to you, you could go back, find the flagged new voice, hear the recording of the person’s name, and enter it in your personal database. Once the app could id someone’s voice, there would be no point in it saving recordings of that person’s voice.

I’m sure this voice id concept is science fiction, and perhaps it would only fix an issue that is unique to me. However, I believe there are millions of people in the world, blind and sighted a like, who could benefit from an app that helps you remember names. Besides, I’m not much for sunglasses.

PS, I know you are looking at the issue from a hardware perspective and that my audio idea is a software solution. Your project might be worth pursuing; I have heard a lot of school projects for "helping the blind" that have less utility then your idea. I would focus on making the product look as normal as possible. You might want to check out the Microsoft seeing AI app. It has a face ID mode, although I find all the other features of the app much more useful, and you have to teach the app each new face, which would be awkward to make all of your friends do.