iVisit SeeStar Offers Persons Who Are Visually Impaired Access To a Remote Sighted Assistant

iVisit SeeStar offers persons who are visually impaired access to a remote sighted assistant.
© Business Wire 2008 2008-04-01 02:30:00 -

iVisit LLC announced today that its iVisit SeeStar & SeeScan mobile applications were selected as finalists in the Third Annual CTIA Emerging Technologies (E-Tech) Awards.

The E-Tech Awards program gives industry recognition and acknowledges the best wireless products and services in the areas of Mobile CE (consumer electronics); Consumer Mobile Applications; Enterprise Solutions; Network Infrastructure; Mobile Widgets; and 4G. CTIA WIRELESS 2008(R), takes place April 1-3 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. The E-Tech Award Ceremony will take place on the Fashion in Motion stage in the Mobile Entertainment eXpo pavilion of the Las Vegas Convention Center on Wednesday, April 2 at 3:00 PM.

iVisit SeeStar offers persons who are visually impaired access to a remote sighted assistant. Using a camera enabled PDA phone visually impaired users can transmit live video to remote assistants on a desktop computer who can in turn provide audio guidance to describe the user’s surroundings, pointing the location of salient landmarks, pathways to destinations, or locating and recognizing objects and signs. The live GPS position of the visually impaired user is also displayed on Google Maps, enabling the remote assistant to offer navigation guidance to points of interest or other location based information that can be overlaid on such GIS databases.

iVisit SeeScan increases the functional independence of visually impaired users by enabling them to access a state-of-the-art object recognition system to easily and quickly detect and recognize specific objects such as packaged goods, money, CDs, etc.

There are approximately 11.4 million people with vision loss in the United States, ten percent of who are legally blind. (Goodrich, 1997; De l’ Aune, 2002) The inability to perform indoor or outdoor way-finding, and to easily search and recognize specific objects and signs in the surrounding environment is a problem for people with severe vision loss and for people who have enough vision to move around independently without a cane or other assistance, but who do not have sufficient vision to easily read signs, product packaging or search for and recognize specific objects.

“We are very excited with the prospect of having developed a technology that we believe will positively impact the quality of life for many visually impaired individuals and empower them with greater mobility and increased functional independence. Sponsored through National Eye Institute (NEI) research grants the design and testing of SeeStar and SeeScan has been end user driven from the onset. After testing the prototypes with over 30 visually impaired users, they all confirmed that these applications even in prototype stage will significantly improve their quality of life,” said Orang Dialameh, iVisit CEO and Founder.

Later this year iVisit will release beta versions of iVisit SeeStar and SeeScan services to users in the US over all major 3G networks and windows mobile pda phones including HTC 6800 (Mogul), HTC Flip, HTC Touch, HTC 6700, Samsung i760, Treo 700 Wx and LG Dominator. Symbian, iPhone and BREW versions are also in the pipeline or on the drawing board.

iVisit sees great potential for SeeStar and SeeScan beyond visually impaired assistance. Some other possible applications are elderly care, remote health monitoring, occupational safety, first responder applications and even commercial applications such as dispatch services, field workforce management, remote inspection and technical assistance and more. “All such users can benefit from our converged fixed mobile applications. Our goal is to make life enhancing services and innovative commercial application affordable for users and in the process create a new set of 3G subscribers for the carriers with minimal impact to their networks,” added Orang.

iVisit SeeStar/SeeScan demo videos can be downloaded on the following link. (15,1Mb, 1:56)
www.ivisit.com/images/video/ivisit_mobile_seestar_seescan.wmv

About iVisit LLC
iVisit is a Santa Monica based technology company focused on delivering high fidelity unified communication and collaboration solutions for businesses and individuals. iVisit technology is developed by a highly capable and experienced team with a strong track record of innovation, including iVisit CEO, Orang Dialameh who co-founded Eyematic Interfaces Inc., a leader in face recognition and rich media communication part of which became NevenVision Inc. later acquired by Google in 2006; and Tim Dorcey, iVisit CTO who is the creator of CU-SeeMe, the first video conferencing solution for PC’s and MAC’s. iVisit’s peer-to-peer architecture is highly scalable and offers a low-cost solution that does not require dedicated servers offering highest quality and best performance for audio/video conferencing and collaboration of groups of 2 to 16 people.

iVisit’s complete unified communication and collaboration platform integrates presence, multi-party conferencing, push to talk, desktop sharing and connected navigation over wireless (2.5G, 3G) and fixed IP networks and devices.

For all press inquiries please contact us at
pr@ivisit.com
. www.ivisit.com
To meet us at CTIA SMS contact us at 310-962-2174.
Please stop by the Emerging Technology Awards Display in the Central Hall Lobby to see our entry!
Vote for iVisit SeeStar/SeeScan as your favorite entry by texting code 315 to 868464.

About CTIA WIRELESS 2008(R)
As the premier global event representing the $500 billion global wireless industry and the largest wireless show in the world, CTIA WIRELESS 2008 brings together all industries affected by wireless technology for three days of intense learning and networking. Visit
www.ctia.org/ctiawireless
. CTIA-The Wireless Association is the international association for the wireless telecommunications industry, representing carriers, manufacturers and wireless Internet providers. CTIA is also recognized as the premiere producer of two annual technology events representing the complete wireless, mobile and Internet industries: CTIA WIRELESS 2008 takes place in Las Vegas April 1-3; CTIA WIRELESS I.T. & Entertainment 2008 takes place in San Francisco September 10-12. Visit
www.ctia.org

. - iVisit LLC Orang Dialameh, 310-428-2228
SOURCE
http://www.pr-inside.com/ivisit-llc-named-finalist-in-ctia-r512239.htm