This Magic Wand Will Describe Whatever You Point It At

For those of us with good eyesight, it’s almost trivially easy to identify and describe any arbitrary object. The human brain is very good at making rapid assessments based on our previous experience, but that’s something that computers have been bad at until recently. Thanks to the power of modern AI, however, computers can now quickly determine what something is, making it possible to build devices like this Seeing Wand.

Operating the Seeing Wand is incredibly easy: just point it at a thing, push a button, and it will identify what it sees and describe it out loud. Aside from being fun for fully-sighted people to play with, the Seeing Wand would also be very helpful for people with impaired vision. The creator, Robert Zakon, was even inspired to create the Seeing Wand by his blind cousin’s use of touch to identify objects in his environment. This device would make it possible for blind users to get a description of items that can’t be immediately touched.

The Seeing Wand works by using the Microsoft Cognitive Services Computer Vision API that has been fed images from a Camera Module connected to a Raspberry Pi Zero. The Microsoft AI attempts to identify what it sees in the picture, and then returns a short description of what it found. That description is then spoken to the user through a Pimoroni Speaker pHAT. With just a few inexpensive components, the Seeing Wand can provide very useful information about the world for people who don’t see well.