Need a Friend? How about a Vision Buddy!
Watching television is something we all enjoy doing, but when you are visually impaired it can be a challenge to keep up with the action that’s happening on screen. You can of course sit closer to the television, but that’s not always comfortable. You might try optical aids such as MaxTV glasses or spectacle mounted telescopes, but they reduce the quality of the image and reduce the field of view. There are electronic magnification devices you can try, but the image quality isn’t always very good because you are watching the TV screen through the electronic magnification device’s camera and screen.
That’s where Vision Buddy comes in! Designed specifically for watching television, this comfortable wearable device transmits the image from your television (or any other source that outputs over HDMI) directly to the glasses, resulting in an excellent image. You can of course then magnify it to your needs, and even the sound comes out of the headset, giving a truly immersive experience! It can be used with your cable box, but also your Apple TV, PC or Mac computer, game console…anything that outputs HDMI!
As well as watching television, you can also use the live magnification mode which gives great magnification for things like seeing people’s faces, going to a concert or play, going sightseeing and so on. The camera in the front of the Vision Buddy provides a good quality image and you can magnify up to 8X, enough to carry out many tasks! There is also an OCR mode which can read printed text aloud to you! Simply hold down a button, look at the print that you want to read, let go of the button and the Vision Buddy can read the text aloud to you.
We think Vision Buddy is the best solution currently available for watching television if you are visually impaired or low vision. There are still areas which can be improved, for example the OCR feature is still quite glitchy, but the TV feature which is the bread and butter of the device works fantastically. As it is a modern product, it can of course be updated as software updates roll out, and users will get all of those updates for free. Rather than you reading about it here, why not check out our video and see Vision Buddy for yourself!