“Seeing machine” offers legally blind view of world

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (Reuters) - A legally blind poet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has designed a “seeing machine” that allows people with limited vision to see faces of friends, read or study the layouts of buildings they intend to visit.

The device, which MIT estimates costs about $4,000 to manufacture, plugs into a personal computer and uses light-emitting diodes to project selected images into a person’s eye, allowing visually impaired users to see words or pictures.

In perhaps its most practical application, a visually impaired person can use the seeing machine to study a three-dimensional computer rendering of a room or public place in order to familiarize themselves prior to traveling there. To use the machine, one looks through an eyepiece and navigates through the image using a joystick in an effect similar to playing a video game.

Perhaps the predecessor to Geordi’s visor, then - it’s still not enough for the totally blind, and doesn’t actually do anything to fix the nearly-blind person’s vision, but even so, it’s pretty cool.

Death, where is thy sting? How about on primetime

Twenty years ago, television tested the waters of suddenly eliminating a major character in a popular series when Patrick Duffy’s Bobby Ewing — a staple of the infamous soap “Dallas” for nearly a decade — was killed off by the show’s writing team to the shock of viewers worldwide.

The series then, however, went into a ratings slump, leaving the network with no other choice than to pull its punch and bring dead Bobby back; turns out he didn’t really die after all. It was only a dream.

Such dramatics are the standard for soap opera entertainment, but in an age where franchise series run nearly a decade with the same lovable (or lovably detestable) cast members, the killing off of major characters is typically shied away from by ratings-hungry networks — until recently.

It’s hard to feel the suspense when you know full-well that character won’t get killed. Slasher movies work because you never know if any of the characters will survive, but with a TV series, generally it’s pretty obvious who will and won’t be in any real danger of getting killed off. Series regulars can only be killed at the end of a season, due to the nature of the contracts, and at that there are certain categories of regulars that are immune even to end-of-season slaughters: title characters, for instance. Hard to have a series about Ms. Bones or Dr. House if they get killed, hmm?
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