[Electronics-Talk] Orcam

[Tracy Carcione]

I saw the Orcam yesterday.  It was pretty nice.

Hold 2 fingers together, and that's about the length and width of the
camera.  There used to be an extra processor, but now it's all in the
camera.

It attaches to a magnet that can clip onto any pair of glasses, on either
side, depending on which hand is dominant.  There's a ridge that runs along
the back of the camera that controls volume, and gives access to a menu that
controls other settings.  The camera can also synch with Bluetooth
headphones.

You point at the thing you want the camera to read, and hold up your hand
flat to pause it.  It read pretty well.  I had it read a very complicated
menu.  It got a lot of one side, and not much of the other, but there was a
lot of curly script and stuff on that side.  It read the shiny brochure the
demonstrator had very well.

The demo person said it can read labels, price tags, signs . whatever.  We
didn't have most of those things to try.  It read a box well.  A can, not so
much.  She said products we use often can be stored in memory, so it
recognizes them quickly.  She also said, if you were in a grocery aisle
looking at products, and it saw one that's in its memory, it would say it,
and you could move around until you actually found it.

There's 2 versions of the Orcam.  They both do all the things I just said.

The fancier one, the Eye, also does color recognition.  That was pretty
slow, compared to my Rainbow color detector.

It also recognizes faces.  It always recognized the demonstrator, and would
tell me when I looked in her direction.  We taught it to recognize Jerry,
but it didn't recognize him so much.  There's a trick to teaching it, so
maybe I did it wrong.  But, even when it didn't recognize him, it would say
"There's a man in front of you."

 

One or both models also read bar codes, but you have to point right at it,
and that's just not happening.

The one that is mostly for reading is $3500, and the Eye that does it all is
$4500.

Tracy