Samsung recently distributed wearable glasses for free to the visually impaired at the Gyeonggi Welfare Center for the Blind in South Korea. The free handover of 30 wearable glasses was to determine the usability of Relumino Glass. The company introduced Relumino Mode for its Smart TVs during CES 2023, which allows people with vision impairments to see the content more clearly.
Samsung's Relumino consists of a Relumino app that uses smartphone processing power to “increase the recognition rate of objects by utilizing the residual vision of people with low vision.” The Relumino also consists of a glass-type wearable device. To enhance the vision of the visually impaired, users need to install an app on their smartphone and connect the wearable device with a cable.
The target audience for this Samsung Relumino Glass is those who are about 90% blind. When a visually impaired person wears the Relumino Glass, the images are captured using the camera mounted on the wearable device. These images are then converted into a form that overall increases the object recognition rate for people with low vision.
Samsung Relumino is still continuously undergoing technological advancements based on feedback
This is achieved through advanced image processing, including contour emphasis, enlargement/reduction, and color inversion/contrast, all done by the smartphone's Relumino app. The Relumino app itself has a UI that makes use of ‘tactile sense', which allows visually impaired people to operate it without looking at the smartphone's screen. The enhanced images are visible in real-time through the Relumino Glass display.
Relumino is Samsung's C-Lab project that was nurtured in 2016 and used Gear VR to assist visually impaired people. A year later, in 2017, Samsung's team developed the Relumino app using Samsung's Gear VR that reflects improved object recognition in real-time. Then the company developed a concept device in 2018 in the form of a wearable glass device.
Currently, Relumino is undergoing advancements in the fields of safety and usability, radio wave certification of glass to ensure quality, clinical trials, SW verification, reliability tests, and user evaluations.
