When ‘google glass’ came out there was too much negative publicity for this technology. Many thought that it is not very useful. I was once discussing with one of my friends regarding google glass and at that time we discussed that google glass can be used by blind people to assist them while they are travelling. At that time even the google glass SDK was not open for developers and the device was a little expensive.
Recently I came across this video (slightly dated) of a similar application of google glass being used by visually impaired users.
This video is quite old. The technology has improved even more now. I am quite hopeful that this technology would go mainstream in a few years and would help many visually impaired people.
The technology I think is very similar to what we have in self driving cars except in this case instead of cars the user is a blind person. The amount of data to process in this case is much more as compared to what we have for a self driving car and there is no lidar system here, that could be one reason why it has not come out yet out of prototype mode.
The application shown in the video seems to be using some image classification examples from machine learning. An actual production ready system would be way more different and complex for this. With the latest innovations in the deep learning field, this application can be made to be quite accurate.
