CAMBRIDGE, June 10: A legally blind poet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has designed a ‘seeing machine’ that allows people with limited vision to see faces of friends, read or study the layouts of buildings they intend to visit.

The device, which MIT estimates costs about $4,000 to manufacture, plugs into a personal computer and uses light-emitting diodes to project selected images into a person’s eye, allowing visually impaired users to see words or pictures.

“The advantage of this kind of display is there’s no extraneous stuff in your peripheral vision that gets in the way,” Elizabeth Goldring, who has published three volumes of poetry, said in an interview. “The image gets projected right onto the retina.”

The device, which Goldring calls a ‘seeing machine’, is housed in a box that measures about 30cms by 15cms.

The seeing machine is not wearable and would not allow one to easily navigate through a crowded, unfamiliar space. But it helps a user study a colour image, such as printed words, pictures of people or room layouts. It only works for people with some living retina cells and a completely blind person would not be able to use the device.

It was tested on 10 people with limited vision — the majority of whom were legally blind, meaning they can see nothing smaller than the large ‘E’ on an eye chart. The majority could see the images and recognise simple words. About 1.3 million Americans are legally blind, according to data from the American Foundation for the Blind.—Reuters