It is true, the wait is for good hassle-free and affordable smart glasses, glasses that I could recommend without hesitation. That in turn depends on having a mass market killer app for the sighted consumer, because the current consumer use cases are not compelling enough for sighted people to want to wear smart glasses throughout the day. Sometimes I recommend as an interim solution to use a virtual reality headset that you can put a smartphone in: sure, it's large and heavy, with a silly appearance, but it is affordable for most blind people, smartphones are mature and have good cameras, while many blind people already have at least one smartphone, and appearance need not be a big issue at home or at work. Definitely not convenient, but it allows one to build up experience in interpreting the soundscapes, which is not something that one can master overnight once convenient smart glasses, say from Apple, hit the market. The vOICe web app is as platform-agnostic as can be, running not only on the iPhone (in the Safari browser) and on Android smartphones, but also on Google Glass, Vuzix Blade, and other Android smart glasses, and even on for instance MagicLeap One glasses (Helio browser), and probably Microsoft HoloLens (Edge browser, untested though). So chances are that The vOICe web app will run on Apple glasses right from day one, provided that Apple does not leave out common browser functionality (for instance, Facebook blocks pixel-level camera access on their Oculus Quest 2 headset, or else The vOICe web app would work on the Quest 2). So for now one cannot escape making some difficult trade-offs.

Thank you! Playing around with it is always a good start, such that things start brewing in the back of your mind, but yes, your time is a precious resource.

Thank you. Perhaps it is something for those who have an uncontrollable yearning for a semblance of sight, but there can be plenty of other more prosaic reasons; I do not know the answers, but my guess is that it is good to have at least the options available.

You probably need some sort of telescope that you can connect a webcam to, plus adequate visual contrast for the target, but perhaps you have other ways of aiming.

Good question! Vision is extremely multi-faceted, making your question difficult to answer. I do not know of anyone yet who fully masters it to the level allowed by the attainable visual acuity, say in the low vision 20/400 range, in the sense of recognizing arbitrary objects in an unfamiliar environment. However, one of the Russian users of smart glasses running The vOICe could efficiently locate, reach for and fetch multiple bright objects cast like dice on a table top, or follow a painted line while running on a sports track. This same user also beat the only two Argus II retinal implant recipients in Russia, at the Neurothlon 2018 blind navigation and object identification contest, and he won by a large margin. Note that the implants cost $150,000 versus $200 for the smart glasses running The vOICe. So the limited evidence that we have strongly suggests that The vOICe outperforms state-of-the-art retinal implants and brain implants (e.g. the Orion I from Second Sight) in terms of functional vision, but we still do not know the limits of what is possible through extensive practice with adequate training. I do not have accessible video material about this Russian user, but you can ask a sighted friend to check out and describe to you the videos on Twitter at $1 and $1

You may also find some video clips with Jens Naumann interesting: he is one of the 16 former recipients of a Dobelle brain implant for vision, making the $1 in 2002, and although he is not a really proficient user of The vOICe due to his wide range of interests, he does use The vOICe, understands the system very well, and demonstrates and discusses it for instance in YouTube videos at https://youtu.be/pyoIq8euEGs and https://youtu.be/0GsDfWqCMqw

Yes, $1 can do that too, as is explained on the web page $1. Of course it can be very hard to interpret with all the fast-paced visual clutter, but in otherwise inaccessible 3D games even the tiniest hints can be helpful. Sometimes a combination with color filters helps. Hope it works for you!

Just for my understanding: are you thinking of putting a notebook PC running Microsoft Windows in a backpack of sorts, with USB camera glasses wired to the USB port of the notebook PC? That will work, and again there are multiple options: you can run The vOICe web app as mentioned in my initial post, in a browser such as Chrome, Firefox or Edge. However, there also exists a native version of The vOICe for Windows, available from $1, so for the discussion it is good to know if you plan to use $1 or $1.

Next, there exist various USB camera glasses, available from vendor sites such as eBay or Amazon, but in my experience the device specifications often do not mention if the glasses can act as a UVC compliant webcam even if they can, because their primary intended use is as an independent video recording device that stores video on an SD card for later transfer to a PC, and that is of course not the functionality that we are interested in: we need to stream and process live video. Therefore some degree of trial and error is often unavoidable with ready-made camera glasses. Your improvised camera glasses with a webcam attached to glasses is your safest bet, but for camera glasses with a better appearance also check out my web page on $1. Note that this page has not been updated for several years now since Microsoft lost the battle for mobile, so some of the information there is likely outdated and some links may be broken, but it still describes various details that can be useful to know.

Thank you. Yes, it is possible to assemble affordable smart glasses based on the Raspberry Pi, and several blind people have done work in that direction. Note that with Raspberry Pi one has the option to run The vOICe web app in a browser, as described above, but it is also possible to run a native Android version of The vOICe in an Android port for Raspberry Pi. For instance, Jacob Kruger from South Africa made an accessible $1, while Pranav Lal from India made a $1.

However, beyond tech-savvy blind people creating smart glasses for their personal use or on a very small scale, how does one organize global availability with sales, distribution, servicing etc? Until there is a commercially viable market for smart glasses for blind people, scalability remains a major issue. Furthermore, Raspberry Pi boards are not yet small enough to create smart glasses with a sleek and elegant appearance. Some blind people therefore instead buy the smallest Android smartphone that they can find, and use the extra phone for the sole purpose of running The vOICe for Android, with the mini-phone mounted in improvised glasses-like frames. Also not sleek, but technically much less demanding to assemble, and in a comparable price range as a Pi based setup. In any case, despite all the challenges, the general direction that you sketch is very interesting and worthwhile, so one needs to keep pushing... BTW, scalability is also a major challenge in organizing training, because learning to see with sound is really hard and not that many people can make it work without some level of 1-on-1 training support.

>it could be pretty cheap to compile the needed parts and 3d print a mount to hold it all together.

Related to the hardware tinkering idea for smart glasses is also a long discussion thread of 9 years ago on the Raspberry Pi forum, titled "$1". At that time The vOICe web app did not exist yet.

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Why these toxic comments? I'm open to criticism, but not to trolling.