September 01, 2016
The latest in mobile technology for the partially blind. The ThirdEye will change the way the world looks for those less able.
With technology making drastic advances, innovative designs are now being developed to support those less abled. For people with disabilities the general day to day tasks can be challenging, however as technology has improved so has its customer out reach. More and more technological developments are supporting people with disabilities and Dotsquares have recently developed an application to support the partially sighted.
Dotsquares have created an ingenious application called the ThirdEye to support those who are partially sighted, to identify some of the everyday objects that we see around us. The ThirdEye is an innovative cloud-based application that analyses visual content in various ways to provide information. For example if there were a tray of doughnuts on a table, you could point the camera over them and then a written description would appear saying “possibly a tray of doughnuts on a table”. Not only can you use the camera, but you can also upload images as well and it will work the same way. All you need to do is click on the image in the camera, or upload an image and then let advanced algorithms do the rest.
By allowing location devices to pin point where you are, the location will then also be included with the description for you to hear, which will be presented in an address format with a postcode. Another bonus feature of the ThirdEye is that it allows you to share your photos and descriptions through text messages, whatsapp and emails. It can even be shared on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
So how does it work? The ThirdEye takes a set of visual features based on what the image contains, and then it delivers information via text and audio descriptions. For this to happen, the API (Application Programming Interface) uses tagging, descriptions and domain specific models to identify the content.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a technology that identifies the text content of an image and then relays that content into a machine- readable character stream used for a variety of purposes.
The ThirdEye App, amongst other high-tech applications, will eventually begin to change the futures of those less able, and is only a starting point of what is yet to come.
If you would like to find out more about the ThirdEye or even if you like the idea of trying it out for yourself, then you can download it from the App store from the following link: 
