Far from the glasses of mixed reality that many large technology companies want to put on sale in the coming years, there are also other technologically advanced glasses that can make our lives much easier, such as the new ones that have presented Cornell researchers.
And it is that researchers from Cornell University have created a new technology that allows silent communication through glasses dream. To make this possible, these glasses make use of small microphones and speakers to listen to the words that the user pronounces in silence.
The good thing about these smart glasses is that they are unobtrusive, like any other, and do not require the user to be in front of a camera or wear a headset.
What these unique goggles do is that they make use of sonar to detect mouth movements, while taking advantage of a deep learning algorithm to analyze echo profiles in real time.
With this, the glasses achieve a 95% accuracy in recognizing the words spoken in silence by the wearer.
Intended uses for these sonar goggles
The most prominent use for this new technology is that people with speech disabilities can use it to silently input dialogue into a speech synthesizer.
Another possible use for the glasses is that they could be used to control music playback controls in a library or to dictate a message at a loud concert.
“Most of the technology in silent speech recognition is limited to a select set of predetermined commands and requires the user to look at or use a camera, which is neither practical nor feasible. We are moving the sonar towards the body”, points out cheng zhangCornell assistant professor of data sciences.
As they say, these glasses only require a few minutes of training data to learn the wearer’s speech patterns.
With this, sound waves could be sent and received through the user’s face, thus detecting their mouth movements while using the aforementioned algorithm to analyze echo profiles.
The first version Cornell researchers have shown offers about 10 hours of battery life for acoustic detection and also offloads data processing wirelessly to the phone.
They are currently exploring the commercialization of this technology, and also applications of smart glasses to track facial, eye and upper body movements.
