Hello our little frozen icicles, and welcome to Part 2 of Sight Village South East. This week we have more interviews with product manufacturers and developers from the recent Sight Village event which took place in London a few weeks ago.
We are talking to:
Bruno Vollmer from biped.ai who tells us about his great product that straps over your shoulders and helps detect obstacles in the area so you can avoid collisions. The harness uses autonomous driving technology to detect obstacles in the wearer's path. You can read more about the product here: https://www.biped.ai/
Ben Andrews tells us about his book “Nicky and Candy's Street (Better Places)”. Ben wrote this book to highlight the issues disabled people currently face so that children, parents and educators can raise awareness of these issues while providing an outlet to take positive action. Ben believes introducing these concepts at an early age will increase these children’s understanding of the difficulties encountered by people with vision impairments so that they grow into adults who are better able to build a more accessible and inclusive future. You can read more about Ben’s book here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nicky-Candys-Street-Better-Places/dp/1913230325
Daniel from Sensotec talks to us about their magnification tool for smartboards in the classroom. Read more about this product here: https://www.pro.sensotec.com/my-board-buddy-air.
Óran catches up with Mike Page from Touchpoint Vision to talk about the latest developments in OrCam and OrCam Read. These wireless smart cameras which, when attached outside eyeglass frames, can read and verbalize text, and also product barcodes. This information is converted to spoken words and entered "into the user’s ear". Face-recognition is also part of OrCam's feature set. You can read more about OrCam here:  https://touchpointvision.co.uk/
Clodagh chats with Alex Ward from Seeing Solutions who tells her about MiniGuide, a smart navigation aid and also an update to the wearable headset Mercury ViewPoint SmartVisor which you can use for magnification or text to speech. Read more about Seeing Solutions products here: https://pamtrad.co.uk/seeing-solutions/.
Alan Davis from Humanware talks to Óran about Annie, a new product for teaching young children Braille in a fun way. Humanware also have the Monarch coming out in 2024. This is a multi-line Braille display. Is this the future of Braille displays? We discuss. You can read more about Humanware products here: https://www.humanware.com, and watch a video about the Monarch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=I5JLDkWGkF0&ab_channel=HumanWare.
Julie Davis and Geoff Madge talk to us about the Ultracane, which uses ultrasound to detect obstacles in your path, enabling you to navigate around them. Find out more about Ultracane here: https://www.ultracane.com
..and finally we speak to 2 of the sighted guide volunteers about their experiences at the event.
It's a packed show folks, so load some paper into your Perkins, type in that email address and start writing your letter to Santa, cos we have no doubt there is something here for everyone’s list.
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