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Podcast Summary:
Kevin Chao joins Jeff Thompson in the Blind Abilities Studio to share with us his experience with the Envision Glasses from LetsEnvision.com plus the Aira App experience on the envision glasses. Kevin also gives us a peak at the Dot Pad, a tactile pad that connects to voice over and conveys tactile representations that one can explore. Along with 20 cells of Braille this tool gives Kevin an understanding that he could not receive before.
Learn how Kevin uses the Envision Glasses, employs the Aira service through the Aira App installed on the envision Glasses and how the Dot Pad is giving Kevin a bigger picture of understanding through tactile imagery.
You can find out more about the products here:
Envision Glasses at LetsEnvision.com
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If you reside in Minnesota, and you would like to know more about Transition Services from State Services contact Pre-ETS Program and Transition Services Manager Sheila Koenig by email or contact her via phone at 651-539-2361.
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Full Transcript
Experience Speaks Loudly – Kevin Chao Has Months of Experience with the Envision Glasses and the Dot Pad. Tactile Graphics on the Dot Pad plus Aira on Envision Glasses!
Kevin:
There’s a feature called Call An Ally. So you can essentially call up friends and family and they can see from your perspective. I think the really cool thing is just going down the street and reading off street addresses or like license plates, and just things that are just out there. Dot Pad is a really cool and fun device that displays tactile ,graphics so it connects to like voiceover on an iOS device and whatever voiceover’s focused on. If there’s like an icon or image, it will provide a tactile graphic representation of that. I can place it exactly where it is, okay, this part’s the heading, this part’s the paragraph. This part’s like radio buttons, or this is a table, this is the column header, and place it more concretely and just place the context and details that they’re providing verbally on the tactile graphics and really have a clear picture.
Jeff:
Welcome to Blind Abilities. I’m Jeff Thompson. Today in the studio, Kevin Chao dropped in. He’s been using the Aira glasses and the Dot Pad for a couple months now. I don’t know how long you’ve been using the Dot Pad, but it’s really cool to have someone actually have some hands on and heads on, I suppose you would say, with the Envision Glasses. Kevin, welcome to the show.
Kevin:
Thank you, Jeff. Happy to be here.
Jeff:
Hey, I’m excited when you reached out to talk about it because not only, you’re not just someone that’s talking about something that you heard about, read about, but here you’ve been using them, and let’s just start out with the Envision Glasses. How are they going for you?
Kevin:
Yeah, the Envision Glasses have been a really cool experience, just with all the built in functionality. Some of the unique functionalities are like built to recognize people on the companion app. You can kind of add friends and family and have them take pictures of, several different pictures of their face, and then the glasses will allow you to recognize them whenever they’re within view, so if you’re in that type of mode. So that’s kind of been cool for like social settings, just to be able to know who’s where. And then it has all the other kind of similar things that one might be familiar with too, if one’s using, like, seeing AI. It’ll describe scenes, scan documents, read text, like short text. It has the cash reader built in so you can recognize currency.
Jeff:
This is similar to like the seeing AI or the Envision app that we all are probably familiar with, which is now free on the iPhone or on the smartphones. It’s basically having that app in a sense, other than those couple features I know that he’ll tell us about, but the main thing is you’re looking at it through the glasses where your head’s facing.
Kevin:
Yeah, and that’s provided some cool experiences when my hands are busy with- like either I’m holding something plus using my cane, so times when I wouldn’t have been able to use Aira before on a phone. And then just to be able to capture moments when I just have the glasses on and kind of share moments. There’s a feature called Call An Ally, so you can essentially call up friends and family, and they can see, from your perspective, see and hear what’s going on.
Jeff:
How do you interact with the glasses to call an ally or to bring up another feature?
Kevin:
So there’s two different ways. All the gadgets are all the kind of gears on the right side of the arm of the glasses. So on the right hand side, there’s like a touch sensitive area where you can perform gestures, so you can either like swipe forward to go to the next items. So when I say swipe forward, it would be like on the- along the right hand side of the glasses, towards the front of your face would be swipe forward and then swiping back would be towards the back of your ear, and then you would like double tap to activate the focused item. So it’s pretty similar to if you’re familiar with touchscreen mobile devices and screen readers. And then there’s also a hinge button that you can perform voice commands.
Jeff:
Oh, really?
Kevin:
So you can hold down a button right on top of the hinge, like the top right corner, push and hold it down like you would do with like the side button for Siri. You can then say, “call an ally,” “short text,” “describe scene,” “identify cash” and so forth. So you can interact with it through the touch gestures or through voice commands.
Jeff:
So how long did it take for you to get comfortable with it? Was the learning curve pretty intuitive?
Kevin:
Yeah, it was really cool because out of the box, they have a pretty cool onboarding tutorial type where it walks you through like all the different features and has you going through this practice mode of repeating the different gestures, like swipe forward four or five times or swipe back so many times and then try double tapping here. And they make it interactive and fun and a good way to learn it. And then on top of that, Envision provides like a 90-minute virtual meeting session where essentially if you have gone through the onboarding or have any questions about figuring out how it’s supposed to be paired or how it works or anything along those lines, that’s what that session’s for.
Jeff:
Oh, wow.
Kevin:
Yeah. So it’s a pretty great training, personal setup and hands-on that walks you through kind of everything. Yeah. Between kind of doing it on your own and being walked through, there’s great up-ramp.
Jeff:
Well, that’s great. So you have the glasses on and you give ’em a call and you got 90 minutes of kicking the tires.
Kevin:
Yeah.
Jeff:
Great. How’s it been for you- what is the use case for you? Do you use ’em on a daily basis?
Kevin:
I would like to use them more. The biggest challenge that I’ve kind of found with them is just making ’em habit and remembering to kind of get them on. But definitely when I’m wanting to do things where I’m either like traveling or kind of going to an unfamiliar place or something where I wanna like share an experience and kind of capture a moment, or trying to build something and put something together that requires both my hands, pulling out for those, like, kind of case by case.
Jeff:
So it’s another tool in your toolbox.
Kevin:
Exactly.
Jeff:
Yeah. The Google Enterprise Glasses, they’ve been around, but it’s really neat that they’re using them, but they kind of talk about how it’s like a beta Glass in a sense. Like they’re using this one as a form factor. How do you like to wear them?
Kevin:
So there’s a couple of times, I wear them for like a longer period of time. Since all the components and parts are on the right side, it kind of gets fatiguing a bit on my right side. That’s if I wear it for like more than, let’s say an hour or two. The ones I got don’t have any lenses, so they’re like the- another model where you can get like prescription lenses, I don’t have the need for those, but I find I still, for example, pull out the Bose frames when I’m outdoors in like kind of bright sunlight.
Jeff:
That’s interesting. There’s no lens in there, right?
Kevin:
No.
Jeff:
Just hollow?
Kevin:
So it’s just a frame and then there’s no lens, and then all the components for everything are on the right side, the camera and microphone, speaker, battery, everything.
Jeff:
I would want it for like low branches or you know, anything like that. Just for protection. Like some people wear baseball caps so that hits something first, or sometimes glasses help when you brush up against a tree or something.
Kevin:
Right.
Jeff:
But they do have an option to get lenses?
Kevin:
Yeah. Prescription lenses.
Jeff:
What’s your greatest experience with them? Did you have an aha moment?
Kevin:
I think the really cool thing is just like really something basic, and just going down the street and reading off street addresses or like license plates and just things that are just out there, and be able to read or identify those things and have access to just like such basic information. A couple other ones are just more being able to capture some pretty cool moments through the ally of like our pets. My wife was able to see some pretty cool moments and stuff like that, that we wouldn’t have been able to capture otherwise.
Jeff:
Oh, that’s cool. What’s the experience with the Aira agent? First of all, how did the Aira agents, when they tell you, I mean, I beta tested the- for the Mac and they said, oh cool. Like, hey, this is kind of neat. What was it like when you told ’em you were wearing the Envision Glasses?
Kevin:
Yeah, similar reactions. They were saying, oh, cool, this is the first time, or this is really nice, or it’s like a wide field of view and they’re able to see everything pretty well.
Jeff:
It’s probably more stable than someone carrying a phone on a lanyard or a chest case, whatever.
Kevin:
Yeah, especially like out and about like walking, they said they were able to see things pretty well and hear pretty well. Yeah, it’s been like a really good experience. The times where it gets a little trickier, it’s just more in like noisy kind of complicated environments like malls or airports, but more so from the audio perspective of like just the built in microphone and speaker. But the cool thing is you can pair it with a Bluetooth headphone or headset, so if you have like another one, like the shocks open comp workarounds, for example, to have like more of a dedicated microphone.
Jeff:
That would take care of that problem, then.
Kevin:
Yeah.
Jeff:
Wow. That’s pretty cool. What would you like to tell the listeners about the Envision Glasses? They’re not cheap, but you were previously an Aira Explorer yourself, I believe?
Kevin:
Yes.
Jeff:
This is something that you wanted back since the Horizon Glasses have disappeared. Now this kind of puts you back into that place. What’s it like not being tethered and how is your experience that way?
Kevin:
Yeah, I’ve been using Aira for, been an Aira Explorer for a while and used Google Glasses, the first edition and then the Horizon had the tethered, so definitely had the journey, and the cool one with this, Envision, is that there are quite a bit of offline tools and some things require off WiFi connectivity as well. But this time, like everything’s self-contained, like you don’t need to use your phone or like initiate everything through the phone. So you can just interact strictly from the glasses and have it be standalone. So that’s probably the major difference.
Jeff:
If you’re at the airport, you could just check your currency and see what dollars you got back right away. Boom.
Kevin:
Yeah. And things like that don’t require WiFi connectivity. So there’s quite a bit of things that are like-
Jeff:
On board.
Kevin:
On board. Yep.
Jeff:
What other stuff is on board that people may not know about?
Kevin:
So there’s like the instant text document reader, recognizing colors, light status. Like it’ll give tones if the lights are on or off.
Jeff:
And when you say instant text, that’s like if you sat down and there’s a piece of paper in front of you and you wanted see what’s on it, you could just OCR it.
Kevin:
Jeff:
Yeah. Wow. Handsfree.
Kevin:
Yes.
Jeff:
Drink in one hand, paper in the other and you’re reading.
Kevin:
Exactly.
Jeff:
It’s so different to be sitting somewhere and have to move everything, and then you want a piece of paper and you gotta make space on the table for it. Set it down, hold up, do it with both hands, hold it steady. Well, you just look like an average Joe. Just, ah.
Kevin:
And that’s the cool thing. Like, I’ve been able just to go out and just like read, like just things- signs or texts that are on like restaurants or shops that are just like- or even like their billboards or just like the menus when you’re at the table and just like read it like anyone else with the Envision Glasses, and it’s not as involved. It’s just more natural.
Jeff:
Yeah, I like that you said that it’s a standalone device. It just hotspots up to your phone, so it’s not as cumbersome as some other devices would’ve been.
Kevin:
Yeah, definitely just makes it more convenient.
Jeff:
So you got these before you knew Aira was coming on board or was that the game changer?
Kevin:
That was the game changer for me. It was around the time, the summer conventions and the preview of Aira talking about them coming to the Envision Glasses. So after I heard about that and Envision made some announcements and changes as well.
Jeff:
Mm-hmm. As someone that’s interested in these, they could go to letsEnvision.com and check out the site there. Or they can go to Aira and check out their package deal there, as well.
Kevin:
Yes.
Jeff:
So what was it like when all of a sudden the Aira app showed up, or was it there when you first got it out of the box?
Kevin:
The funny thing is part of the onboarding, since I figured out how the glasses work, at least the basics of it, was more able to just kind of share some feedback and thoughts and then get involved in the beta, so I was able to participate in the beta for Aira. So I got a bit earlier, but not a whole lot. But yeah, it was super cool to do that first couple calls just to test, put some real world, and to kind of just get it out there for just, I mean, really kind of things that seem pretty basic, but I probably wouldn’t have gotten them if they were on my phone or in a different form factor.
Jeff:
So after this experience that you’ve had over the last couple months here, thumbs up or thumbs down overall?
Kevin:
Oh, thumbs up. Happy with them.
Jeff:
Wow, that’s good. That’s a good feeling because I’ve gotten products sometimes that I’m excited for ’em and it wears off, you see them sitting off on the side. But it’s nice to know that you’re starting to use them. You know, you said an hour, little fatigue with them, a little bit, but you probably are using them, like you said, as a tool when you need ’em, when you want to use ’em, and it’s nice to have that option because the options are good.
Kevin:
Yes, definitely.
Jeff:
There’s another tool that you’re talking about and I was really excited about this ‘cause I’ve always been intrigued, but you’re using it in a way that is more interesting than anything else that has been out there. It’s the Dot Pad, where you can get some topographical feeling of a shape of something, and you mentioned to me icons and just going around the different icons and I was thinking about this, that it really probably is neat to have a relationship of where X is and where Y is, and now you can do that with your fingertips. Why don’t you tell us about this new device, the Dot Pad?
Kevin:
Yeah. The Dot Pad’s a really cool and fun device that displays tactile graphics, so it connects to like voiceover on an iOS device and whatever voiceover’s focused on it will, if there’s like an icon or image, it will provide a tactile graphic representation of that. I think it’s 300 cells and 2400 pins that you’re interacting with. So it’s-
Jeff:
A lot of options there.
Kevin:
Probably about the size of an iPad. The really cool thing is you get like the layout and structure of things. There’s not a whole lot of detail that you can get in just, I mean, the kind of age-old problem with tactile graphics.
Jeff:
Oh yeah.
Kevin:
That really does better with kind of basic information, but it’s been really fun and cool just to kind of explore, just, whether it be like the different app icons that you interact with all the time, whether it be like messages, phones, like app store, phone, the unique shape of those or real time things like the James Webb telescope images of like the planets or stars or how they’re seeing them.
Jeff:
I got a question for you. When you felt the black hole, did your hand just fall right in?
Kevin:
It did.
Jeff:
That’s really cool. They’ve really done a lot of things with this stuff, like the sonographs where you can hear it and now you’re able to actually, right at your fingertips, get a sense of another perception of it.
Kevin:
Yeah, it’s super cool. Just you’ll get the outline, the shape of it, and like where different parts are just like filled in or raised. The only kind of- you only get like raised information or like it’s up or down, basically. There’s not like dimensions at the moment or dimensions with this unit.
Jeff:
But it’s something. I like that, that they’re doing something, that someone actually put this together. There’s actually 20 braille cells on there too, is, for reading?
Kevin:
Yeah, so there’s 20 braille cells at the bottom for reading, so whatever’s similar to the standard braille display. And then in between the tactile graphics and the braille display portion are six buttons that are used for, basically, from left to right are the left arrow, pan left, home, activate, and right and right arrow. So they’re used for navigation and kind of interaction.
Jeff:
Do you think this use factor is good for students who are in college and high school?
Kevin:
Oh yeah. I mean, I was trying to explore or find just like different graphs or elements that like I remember coming across in high school and college for math and science and it’s super cool to explore like this, just different scientific like molecules or elements and things of that sort, or like math, like different graphs and just geometric shapes and stuff like that. Yeah, it’s cool for that.
Jeff:
I gotta ask this question. Did you put your photograph under there, check it out?
Kevin:
I did. And plus like even our puppy we got recently. He graduated, and I was able to feel his diploma, him and myself all in the picture.
Jeff:
Oh wow. And since you knew what it was, you had an idea. Did that help to have that?
Kevin:
Yeah.
Jeff:
Yeah. Cool. Yeah, that’s something about- when I receive braille pictures, you know, where you can feel something like it’s Thanksgiving dinner or something of that nature. It’s nice that they have the braille cells down below because you could read that, you know, James Webb telescope and then you can go up and explore and put it to a context or a perception that you can at least relate to.
Kevin:
Yeah. In the professional context of like different like designs or wire frames, or like even getting like screenshots of things, for example, able to like explore those things now and kind of at least get the layout and structure, and then when people go through and describe different parts of it, I can place it exactly of where it is, okay, this part’s the heading, this part’s the paragraph. This part’s like radio buttons or this is a table, this is the column header, and place it more concretely and just place the context and details that they’re providing verbally on the tactile graphics to really have a clear picture.
Jeff:
Yeah, it’s nice to get that spacial recognition to something in proximity to something else. Yeah. It makes a better picture. I first heard about that dot watch when they had the braille, they only had two cells or four cells maybe, and you could tell the time. And that was the start of their diving into the blindness and visually impaired world of technology. And this seems, like, to be something that they really dreamed up would be useful and helpful. So what do you think about the Dot Pad now that you’ve had it?
Kevin:
Yeah, I started with the dot watch and helped beta test that. And yeah, it was really cool to see that transformation going from four cells to this tactile graphics. It’s early days, but I kind of feel it’s like opening up, like with screen readers we have, we’ve had access to essentially like the command line interface, and now this is giving us access to actual GUI, like the graphical user interface. So it’s I think a really cool and fun experience and I’m excited to kind of see where this and other tactile graphics things go to really give us that, that GUI access.
Jeff:
Yeah, they did quite a jump up from four cells up to 300 or so. That’s pretty impressive. How are the dots to you on their 20 cell display? How are their dots to you?
Kevin:
They’re kind of inconsistent and a little difficult to read and I would not necessarily put them up there with the-
Jeff:
Human-ware.
Kevin:
Yeah. Like I personally use the active braille display by Help Tech, we compared it to, yeah. Things like [unintelligible] either.
Jeff:
But when you’re designing something totally from scratch, out of the blue, basically, with that many cells on a device, is it loud?
Kevin:
It’s much quieter. It’s not as loud as like the Orbit, for example.
Jeff:
Yeah, that’s loud. So how do you hook that up? Is it Bluetooth?
Kevin:
Yeah, so it’s Bluetooth, it pairs up like a standard, um, braille display. And there’s nothing special, once you hook it up through voiceover settings as a braille display, it just instantly, whatever voiceover’s focused on will start displaying tactile graphics. And there’s some cool new additional rotor settings that are part of- that just came out as well for, it’s about four or five of them, around changing like the thickness of the braille lines, inverting them, zooming, and then like also scrolling horizontally and vertically.
Jeff:
Oh wow.
Kevin:
Yeah. Those are just available to anyone now, with- under the voiceover rotor settings, that’s just towards the bottom, but there was specifically impact, like the Dot Pad.
Jeff:
Oh wow. That’s pretty cool. I’ve never heard of that before. So is it on right now?
Kevin:
Let me connect it to my phone. I don’t know if you’re able to hear that.
Jeff:
That is quiet.
Kevin:
Go to a previous app.
Jeff:
Oh, I heard it real lightly. That’s quiet.
Kevin:
Yeah, it’s pretty quiet and it’s pretty fast. It’s about a second, maybe a little bit more. So I just navigated through a few different apps, I’m gonna try to go one more.
Jeff:
I was expecting with all that action that is going on those braille cells, I was expecting, you know, something like dominoes falling.
Kevin:
No, it’s very quiet and it is like the tactile graphic parts of it feels really nice. There’s almost like this film portion of it that covers it for protection, but aside from that, it’s- the actual tactile graphic portion of it is probably about the size of my palm, but I know that’s relative.
Jeff:
What was it like when you first saw one of the icons that you used daily and all of a sudden you saw the icon and went, hmm.
Kevin:
It just really, like, every time I’ve felt different icons or images, it just like really put a smile on my face. It just made me feel delighted. I was like, this is really cool, like this is the thing I’ve been interacting with.
Jeff:
Yeah. And no idea of what they represented, what anything was. Now at least you can have something at the- at your fingertips to give you some sensation, and that’s a really neat thing about this, is you don’t have to ask someone to describe it to you. You get your own, your own picture of it.
Kevin:
Right.
Jeff:
Wow. That’s really cool. I feel like no one’s listening and we’re just having a chat here.
Kevin:
No, it really is super cool. It’s just been absolutely, I wanna say eye-opening, but it just really kind of opened up my world and just like made me curious and want to kind of explore and go find, look through like past images that I just have on my phone or just things that are out there on the web or people are talking about and just, I mean, for example, if I, like previously, if I got unlabeled images or screenshots or stuff like that, I’m like, okay, great. But now I’m like, oh, fun. Let me check this out and see what this is, let me see what this means.
Jeff:
Oh, cool. I got one question. I kind of passed it up earlier. When you were talking about people recognition with the Envisioned Glasses, have you been able to identify your dog , your puppy?
Kevin:
No, I wish, there’s not puppy recognition or dog recognition. I tried.
Jeff:
I suppose you’ve been trying everything. I think I would too, I’d be taking it out the box, walking around the house, just doing anything. And I think that hands-free is ultimately what it’s about, because you know, even when you’re walking around the house, you’re familiar with your house, but you gotta be ready for the door jambs, a chair pulled out or something like that. And when you have your phone in your hand and you’re trying to do too much, it’s just a little more awkward. So yeah. Good for you. Good for you. I’m glad you like ’em. I’m glad you did the adventure. I’m glad you reached out to talk about it because it’s the experience, that’s what people wanted to learn about is what’s it like for someone that has been using ’em, and you’ve been using ’em for quite a bit now, so thank you so much for coming on and talking about these.
Kevin:
Yeah, happy to share and appreciate you getting me on here to just connect and share information, my experience.
Jeff:
Great stuff. All right, take care, Kevin.
Kevin:
Take care. Thanks.
Jeff:
And for more podcasts with a blindness perspective, check us out on the web at www.blindabilities.com, on Twitter @blindabilities, and download the free Blind Abilities app from the App Store and Google Play Store.
That’s two words, blind abilities. And if you want to leave some feedback, give us some suggestions, give us a call at 612-367-6093. We’d love to hear from you. A big shout out to Chee Chau for his beautiful music, you can follow Chee Chau on Twitter @lcheechau. I want to thank you for listening, and until next time, bye-bye.
[Music] [Transition noise] -When we share
-What we see
-Through each other’s eyes…
[Multiple voices overlapping, in unison, to form a single sentence]
…We can then begin to bridge the gap between the limited expectations, and the realities of Blind Abilities.