This is truly amazing – one of the many advances at CES 2024 is going to be a comfortable headset that blind people can wear to let them see the world around them using haptic technology that lets people feel the world around them!

These glasses are incredible. Think of the way bats use echo-location to “see” through sound. What if there was a way to do this by letting blind people “feel” where they are, in real time, using cameras and sensors, with an AI agent that helps you get around, and can even read text on cereal boxes or anything else in front of you.

It reminds me enormously of the “visor” that Star Trek Enterprise engineer from “The Next Generation” show, Geordi Laforge, would see when he looked out at the world – and when you watch the videos below, you’ll know what I mean, although the graphics are just a representation for us sighted folks, the people wearing the headset are feeling it all, but it gives them incredible mobility and independence.

It’s like having a digital guide dog, and with 40 million blind people worldwide, and only 28,000 Guide Dogs, .lumen wanted to create a technology that was truly scalable.

The tech will be unveiled at CES, from a company called Lumen, or rather .lumen, pronounced as “dot lumen”, and I’m super keen to see it in action!

.lumen is a research startup which builds glasses that empower the blind to live a better life.

Cornel Amariel is the founder of .lumen, and comes from a family where all members except himself have disabilities, which motivated him to solve the lack of assistive technology issue.

Using self-driving tech scaled down to a headset, the Glasses replicate the main features of a guide dog without the drawbacks that make the guide dog a non-scalable solution ($60k training cost and there are only 28 thousand guide dogs to 40 million blind individuals).

Operating at the limit of what self-driving, AI, and robotics technology can do, the .lumen Glasses have been tested by over 250 blind individuals, are currently in Clinical Investigation, and will soon reach the market.

The first video below is the video being shared with the CES invitation to learn about the tech.

The second video below is from two years ago, with an earlier version of the headset , and big cables, The 2024 version is clearly a big advancement. Technology giving people true super powers!

Here’s the video from two years ago:

Here are some short teaser videos from three years ago: