0:46

Hello everyone! Welcome to Talking

0:48

Tech. This edition available from June

0:51

the 25th, 2024.

0:53

I'm Stephen Jolly, great to have you with us

0:55

listening through Vision Australia Radio associated

0:58

stations of RPA Australia or maybe

1:00

the Community Radio Network. There

1:02

is also the podcast. To catch that

1:04

all you need to do is search for the two words

1:06

talking tech. And then it can

1:08

all come, usually on a Tuesday afternoon just

1:11

after it's been produced. Another option

1:13

is to ask your Siri device or smart speaker

1:15

to play Vision Australia Radio

1:18

talking tech podcast Vision

1:20

Australia Radio talking Tech podcast

1:23

with me, someone who can explain all

1:25

this tech stuff really well. Vision Australia's

1:27

national advisor on access technology,

1:30

David Woodbridge. David,

1:33

let's start with the product

1:35

minute from the vision store

1:37

of Vision Australia. It's not really

1:39

high tech this one, but pretty useful.

1:41

What this product is is called

1:44

the mesh gloves.

1:46

And you can buy them for both your left and your right

1:48

hand. You can buy them for

1:50

small, medium and large hands.

1:53

What caught my attention about

1:55

this? And by the way, when we say mesh gloves,

1:58

we're not thinking about sort of like

2:00

gauntlet type stuff that you'd wear in the medieval

2:02

days. Um, when we say mesh,

2:04

it's very fine mesh the same way that

2:06

steel wool feels. That's

2:09

the the type of mesh that's on this glove.

2:11

And they've got like an inner glove.

2:13

Um, because you don't want sort of the scratchy surface

2:15

scratching your hand. But

2:18

as I said, what caught my attention was the fact that

2:21

it prevents your hand getting

2:23

things like cut when you're using

2:25

a very sharp knife. So the trick

2:27

is, normally you normally would just buy one

2:30

glove to have on your non-dominant

2:32

hand, because that's normally the hand that's holding something

2:34

like a, like an apple or

2:36

a banana that you're cutting up with a knife. So

2:39

the mesh gloves on that hand, and then you've got

2:41

the knife in your dominant hand and you're cutting.

2:44

And the thing is that if

2:46

that knife then slips onto your, your

2:48

finger or the palm of your hand or the back of your

2:50

hand because you're wearing the, quote, mesh

2:52

glove, um, you're not going to slice or

2:54

cut yourself. But the other thing

2:57

that I realized, what I can do with it, which

2:59

is also recommended as well, is

3:01

you can use it for gardening, because

3:03

when I use my pruning shears,

3:05

which are quite sharp, my

3:07

pruning saw, which is even sharper,

3:10

I sometimes

3:12

slip and I'll just sort of

3:14

gradually, like almost nick the

3:16

side of my fingernail, which I've done quite a few

3:18

times, or I'll get my knuckle on my hand

3:21

and that sort of stuff. And that's the

3:23

type of stuff that this mesh

3:25

glove would certainly protect against.

3:27

So again, really, really, really

3:29

good. And price wise they're $15

3:32

from the Vision store.

3:34

The vision store of Vision Australia,

3:36

the mesh gloves. One

3:39

of the things we didn't cover when we were reviewing

3:42

the Apple event at

3:44

WWDC worldwide,

3:46

developers conference a couple of weeks ago.

3:48

TV, the TV app,

3:50

which of course is related to Apple TV. Just

3:53

tell us how all that fits together and

3:55

what's happened with the TV app this year.

3:57

Yes. So the original Apple

3:59

TV itself is actually the little

4:01

box that you plug in via a HDMI

4:03

cable into your back of your TV. So

4:06

that actually is the Apple TV.

4:08

Um, it's like plugging your, you

4:10

know, your Foxtel box into your,

4:13

your big TV screen, but

4:15

where it gets a little bit more interesting

4:18

for us, iOS and Mac

4:20

and iPad users is

4:22

there's also an app running on those

4:24

platforms. So like you've got the Foxtel

4:26

Go app that runs on

4:28

Android and iOS and so on.

4:30

You've also got that TV app

4:33

that runs on iOS,

4:35

and the reason why you can choose

4:37

to do either one is that, you know, when

4:39

you're out and about and you've got your iPhone or your iPad,

4:42

you can watch it quite nicely on your

4:44

own little screen or your big screen. But

4:46

then when you're at at home, of

4:48

course, you want to watch it through the the

4:50

Apple TV box plugged into your, as

4:53

they say in the States 80 inch

4:55

screen, which is huge. Uh,

4:57

to enjoy it. Now, what WWDC

5:00

was talking about is they've done a few

5:02

things. So the Apple TV

5:04

box itself, so not so much.

5:06

The app is compatible with projectors.

5:08

And there they're the projectors that can

5:11

put the whole picture up on your whole

5:13

wall of your lounge room. So

5:15

very, very, very big. The second

5:17

one is that they're making Airplay compatible

5:19

with more external type speakers,

5:22

not just HomePods. And

5:24

the third thing that applies to both

5:26

the Apple TV box and

5:28

the TV app is that

5:30

the dialogue in movies

5:33

and TV shows, which can be quite

5:35

quiet sometimes, um, compared

5:37

to what else is going on, you can actually

5:39

set it so it's a lot louder, so you can quite

5:42

easily hear what the actors

5:44

are saying over. You know, the action

5:46

background type sound. So those

5:48

three things have made a huge improvement

5:51

to both the Apple TV box

5:53

itself and of course, the TV app itself

5:55

as well.

5:56

And with all the other products announced

5:58

at the WWDC event,

6:01

we can look forward to that later

6:03

this year, maybe around sometime in spring.

6:05

Correct. Let's

6:07

talk about vision technology now,

6:10

and this will probably need a series of

6:12

conversations to cover it thoroughly.

6:15

It encompasses software

6:17

or applications as well

6:19

as devices. Should we start talking

6:21

about devices today,

6:24

the wearables that are available in Australia?

6:27

Indeed. And we're specifically

6:29

talking about Australia, because I

6:31

don't want to talk about ones that you can only

6:33

get from overseas or you can use

6:35

in Australia if you start doing weird and wonderful things

6:37

with them. So the three main ones I want

6:39

to talk about is the AR

6:42

vision. The

6:45

vision smart glasses

6:47

and the Orcam

6:49

Myeye three. So

6:52

the AR vision is

6:54

literally a camera with a USB-C

6:57

cable that plugs into

6:59

at the moment your Android phone,

7:02

your Blind shell classic

7:04

two, and then hopefully

7:06

in about another couple of weeks or so, your iPhone.

7:09

And I've got a funny feeling it's going to be the iPhone

7:11

50 and above because it needs USB-C.

7:14

The second one is the end vision glasses.

7:16

Now of course, they're actually based on

7:18

the Google Enterprise

7:21

Google Glass. They're like wearing

7:23

a sort of a weird pair of

7:25

frames without any glass in them.

7:27

And you've got a little camera on the side

7:29

that, you know, points forward the same way the

7:32

vision does. And then you've got,

7:34

of course, different software that you can run via

7:36

touch or voice. And then the

7:38

third one, which is the very famous one

7:40

that lots of people have heard about, is the Orcam

7:43

Myeye three. That's

7:45

a dedicated little camera that

7:48

magnetically attaches to the side of

7:50

your glasses, and that can be

7:52

put on any glasses, whether it's, you know, reading

7:54

glasses or whatever else, and the

7:56

new version of that which wasn't

7:58

available previously, that's also

8:00

on the internet or access to the internet.

8:03

The same with the other two.

8:04

What sort of money are we talking about for

8:06

these devices? They go into thousands of dollars.

8:09

They do. And these are only very rough

8:11

figures. The RCS vision is probably going to be around

8:13

about $1,600. Australian.

8:16

The envision glasses

8:19

is probably around about $5,000.

8:22

And then the my

8:25

eye, the Orcam one is close

8:27

to up to between 7.5 to

8:29

$8000. They're not particularly

8:32

cost effective in some ways, except, of course,

8:34

for the vision one. But

8:36

what it boils down to is, and

8:38

I've got all the pages in the show notes, but it

8:40

really boils down to what type of features you

8:43

want out of these types of

8:45

hardware technology.

8:47

So let's go through some of these features. Now

8:49

we'll start with the R.

8:50

So the R it's interesting

8:52

because it's a wired connection to both

8:54

your Android phone. And like I said later on your

8:57

iPhone it's a lot faster

8:59

in processing information because

9:01

it's directly attached to your smartphone

9:04

like all the other ones. It does instant

9:07

text reading. So as soon as the camera sees

9:09

some text starts reading it out to you, it'll

9:11

do whole document reading. Uh,

9:14

it will do face recognition.

9:16

It'll also do QR code

9:18

detection. And then

9:21

and here's where it gets very interesting.

9:23

If you then team it up with the Seeing Eye

9:26

app currently on Android, then

9:28

you've got all the functionality of the Seeing

9:30

Eye app from Microsoft. So of course

9:33

that's things like short text again,

9:35

document reading, barcode reading,

9:38

handwriting, light detection,

9:40

color detection, all that sort

9:42

of stuff that you would normally get or do get in the

9:44

Seeing Eye app. Uh,

9:47

it's just the fact that it's using the AR vision

9:49

camera, not the smartphone camera.

9:51

So that makes it very flexible.

9:54

So I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on

9:56

that. Um, hopefully in a month or two.

9:58

The Navy Lens app also

10:00

interacts with this.

10:02

It does. And that's sort of like a fancy,

10:05

uh, QR code that can be detected

10:07

from quite a long way away. I

10:09

believe it's up to about 4 or 5m, because

10:11

normally with QR codes you've got to be very

10:14

close. This one will guide you in

10:16

or let you know what QR codes are around you

10:18

for the Navy lens. So particularly

10:20

for shops and public places,

10:23

they're really, really useful. So

10:25

I might have some news on that for the vision

10:27

store later on or next year.

10:29

The Envision Eye smart

10:31

glasses.

10:32

I won't go through the items that I've

10:34

just read out for the AR vision, because

10:36

it's exactly the same. But

10:39

what the envision glasses do,

10:41

which is the AR vision doesn't do,

10:43

is that it's also got artificial. Intelligence.

10:45

So, um, you can get it

10:47

to interrogate documents that

10:50

it's read so you can say, you know, what's the price

10:52

of my electricity bill? Um, you

10:54

can get it to ask general questions for

10:57

AI itself. And of course, it's

10:59

also got a thing called smart reading, where

11:01

it will try and, you know, smartly

11:03

summarize a document for you.

11:06

So it's a lot more advanced

11:08

than the IR vision, precisely

11:10

because the fact it does use the AI,

11:13

which is actually ChatGPT.

11:14

Tell us about Orcam Myeye

11:17

three.

11:18

Again, it sort of builds upon what

11:20

ARX and what envision does.

11:22

So for example, we've still got all that text

11:24

reading, but we've also got,

11:27

um, besides the AI, artificial intelligence,

11:30

we've also got a few other features.

11:32

One of which is, um,

11:34

you can link it up via a browser

11:37

to a basically

11:40

an electronic video magnifier.

11:42

So whatever the camera is looking at

11:44

is going to come up in the browser,

11:46

on your Mac, on your windows, or on

11:48

your your other iPhone or your

11:50

iPad or your Android tablet, because it's

11:52

just a it's just a web browser magnification.

11:54

So that's looking extremely

11:57

interesting. And the other

11:59

thing that I found with the orcam

12:02

itself in particular, it's very good at barcode

12:04

reading. So the other ones I mentioned,

12:06

QR code reading. Um, Kiap

12:09

also does barcode reading, of course, but

12:11

with the Orcam it's very good on

12:13

barcode identification. It's

12:15

also very good on face recognition. So if

12:17

you tell it to recognize a person's particular face,

12:20

it works extremely well.

12:22

So as you can tell

12:24

each one of these, the AR vision,

12:27

the envision and the Orcam

12:30

all do slightly different things. And

12:32

as I said in the beginning of our chat

12:34

about this, it really depends on what you want

12:36

to do. Now, the thing that concerns

12:38

me, though, uh, with all

12:41

three of these is

12:43

this seam detection. And I

12:46

purposely didn't mention this when I was talking about them,

12:48

because this is the one that I've got concerns about

12:50

because all of them do scene detection. So

12:52

when you walking down the street, it'll say, you know,

12:54

there's a tree to our left in

12:56

front of you, there's a pole, there's a

12:58

red postbox coming up, um, there's

13:01

a shop, etc., etc.. The

13:03

problem with scene detection, because

13:06

it's actually generated through artificial

13:08

intelligence and machine learning,

13:11

it's comparing what that

13:13

image is, is to lots of other

13:15

trained images. And

13:18

if the camera can't get the image

13:20

nice and clear, it's going

13:22

to give you the wrong information back. So I'll give

13:24

you an example. My wife

13:27

drives a red Subaru Forester

13:29

now in certain conditions, because

13:31

it's looking at the back of the car,

13:34

it thinks it's the back of a red bus.

13:37

Other times it thinks that my

13:39

red bin is a fire hydrant.

13:41

So I guess what I'm

13:43

concerned about is if

13:46

you want these things for object recognition

13:48

and scene detection and be able

13:50

to rely upon it, I

13:53

would still say at the moment, and

13:55

this includes all three of them. The

13:57

answer is do not depend upon them

13:59

because it's not accurate enough to be that

14:01

safe.

14:02

Now, one interesting area of application

14:04

for these devices is for

14:06

people with low vision, isn't

14:08

it? Because we tend to think of them as for people

14:11

who are totally blind, but if you're out there

14:13

having trouble reading the signage or

14:15

the packaging in the stores, etc.,

14:17

but you do have some vision, these devices

14:20

could offer the solution.

14:21

That's right. And they're also effectively

14:23

hands free. So you can point

14:26

the camera at whatever you want to have a look at.

14:28

Um, or pick up something and just quote,

14:30

look at the actual item and it'll tell

14:32

you what it is. So from a low vision point of view,

14:35

it's great.

14:36

I know of people using these devices

14:38

at museums and exhibitions to read signage.

14:41

Hmm. Very interesting.

14:43

Now, before we go, a reminder of

14:45

where there are details of what we've been talking about

14:47

in this and previous editions of the program.

14:49

Indeed.

14:49

So as always, you can check out my blog site, which

14:52

is David Woodburn, Dot Podbean

14:54

pod Cbn.com David.

14:56

Woodburn Podbean podbean.com.

15:00

To write to the program you can.

15:02

Write to me at Vision Australia where I work, which is

15:04

David Woodbridge, how it sounds

15:07

at Vision Australia.

15:08

Org David Dot Woodbridge at

15:11

Vision Australia. Org this

15:13

has been talking tech with me has been Vision

15:15

Australia's national advisor on access

15:17

technology David Woodbridge I'm

15:19

Stephen Jolly take care. We'll talk more tech

15:21

next week. See you.