You may recall some of my earlier posts related to the Raspberry Pi computer:

• Internal Autodesk Contest: Win a Raspberry Pi computer
• Internal Raspberry Pi Contest: And the winners are...
• Toward Making Facial Recognition As Easy As Pi
• Raspberry Pi: Poly want a cracker?

When 12-year-old Schuyler St. Leger talked at AU 2012 about small general purpose computers like the Arduino and Raspberry Pi, it reminded me of our internal efforts. I am happy to share another story. Senior Software Engineer, Norman Hu's idea was:

With one camera and one speaker, a Raspberry Pi Computer can be used as an assistant to read a book to the blind. Usually the blind have to read Braille by touching their fingers to the page. This traditional approach requires that they obtain a special copy of each desired book instead of a standard one off the shelf. If they have this machine, the camera can take a photograph of a book’s page, the application installed in Pi computer can translate the photo to an article, and then the application can read the article aloud through a speaker. This new approach would open up a world of books to the blind that are not available in Braille.

Norman worked with his peers in Shanghai on completing the project. They created this 4-minute video:

Software Development Manager, Bruce Song, let us know that the team was successful in making the idea real. He wanted to show his sincere appreciation to:

• CTO, Jeff Kowalski, for the donation of the Raspberry Pi
• Autodesk Labs for organization of the competition
• Ling, Bruce H and Robin for device support like camera, SD card etc.
• Norman Hu for his great idea
• Everyone on the team (Norman Hu, Quill Chen, Rain Chen, Gavin Jiang, Shelby Liu, Christopher Zhang, Keda Weng) for their contributions

Bruce is really proud of each and every one on the project. From the process he saw the team's passion on new ideas and the courage and perseverance to solve the technical difficulties.

Reading aloud is alive in the lab.