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Smart glasses introduced for hearing impaired theater goers

The trial is taking place in the U.K., at The National Theatre in London. At the start of October 2018, the organization introduced smart caption glasses. The Royal National Theatre is one of the U.K.’s three most prominent publicly funded performing arts venues, alongside the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal Opera House.

The smart caption glasses have the functionality to display dialogue on the lenses as actors speak, allowing those who have hearing difficulties to follow the action. The glasses are available at no cost to patrons. Two of the theater’s three stages have the glasses available, form the current productions of “War Horse” and “Hadestown.” If the trial goes without any hitches the glasses will be available for all productions from January 2019.

Marie Pascall, who is the founder of Performance Interpreting (which is a service for sign language interpreters) told The New York Times that the glasses were “fantastic”, stating “You get a complete sense of the whole play. You’re not having to ping-pong between the actors and words.”

The software that operates the smart glasses has been developed so that it to respond to lighting changes and stage directions, as well as following the words as spoken. The smart glasses are similar in concept to Google Glass.

The National Theatre’s technology, was designed by its own IT department together with consultants from Accenture plus Andrew Lambourne, who is an academic and expert in live subtitling. The glasses were manufactured by the the company Epsom, who provided 40 glasses for free (with the National Theatre spending £599 – $785 – for each pair, purchasing a further fifty pairs).

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Written By

Dr. Tim Sandle is Digital Journal's Editor-at-Large for science news. Tim specializes in science, technology, environmental, business, and health journalism. He is additionally a practising microbiologist; and an author. He is also interested in history, politics and current affairs.

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