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This Hungarian invention gives back the joy of reading to the blind
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Gloveye is a successful Hungarian startup that makes it possible for the blind people to read typed texts. They won the national Microsoft Imagine Cup and got invited to the final in Seattle as well. Now, they are about to travel to Amsterdam. Forbes.hu writes about this amazing team.
The team
Ádám Fülöp and Krisztián Klinkó are the founders of Gloveye. They are making music, and they have a band called Fadi&Klinko. They were travelling to Cologne when Krisztián told his idea to Ádám. As he was travelling by tram in Budapest, he saw a blind person making a screenshot on his mobile so that a programme could read the text out loud. It did not seem like a good solution, for Ádám not only because of the loud noises that made the phone hard to hear but also because the person had a hard time holding the handrails. This was when the idea popped up in his mind:
a gadget that transfers typed words into Braille signs in gloves could be a solution.
Ádám and Krisztián applied for Microsoft’s international innovational competition the ImagineCup. Teams with three members could join the event. Therefore Bogi Zemkó joined them representing the business line. This time, the guys had already been attending the master degree programme at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. Bogi had been studying at Corvinus University, and she knows Ádám from Mathias Corvinus Dormitory.
Getting started
Krisz was responsible for the hardware and Ádám was the programmer theoretically. However, everyone was dealing with everything in reality. It had always been the team’s priority to help those in need; this is why they contacted many organisations. They invented something, showed it to the experts and if it did not work, they tried again. For the sixth time, they managed to develop gloves that really worked.
How does it work?
Gloveye produces smart gloves that help the visually impaired people read. The users scan the whole text with their phones, the application warns them if not the full page is about to be scanned, then they can go forwards and backwards with scrolling up and down with the gloves.The phone communicates with the Braille cells in the gloves via Bluetooth.
As the users touch a word on the screen, the programme formes that given word into Braille signs that the users can feel them in the gloves.
