A poet146;s seeing machine

people with impaired vision get a glimpse of the real world

Elizabeth Goldring8217;s eyesight has come and gone over the years. Mostly, it has gone. Now 61, she has had juvenile diabetes since college, and the disease has pecked away at her vision, causing haemorrhages in her retinas, the fragile layer of light-sensitive cells at the back of the eye. About 10 years ago, when she was nearly blind in both eyes, her doctor recommended a test to find out whether she had any healthy retina left at all. The test involved a large 100,000 machine called a scanning laser ophthalmoscope, which would let the doctor examine her retinas and project images directly onto them. If there were any live spots, the device might let her see.

It worked. She saw a stick-figure turtle. Goldring, a poet who has had three books published, asked to see a word. She was able to read 8216;8216;sun8217;8217;. It was the first word she had seen in many months. 8216;8216;For a poet, that8217;s an incredible feeling,8217;8217; she said. 8216;8216;I said almost immediately, 8216;I need to get in touch with the man who invented this machine8217;.8217;8217;

She wanted a scaled-down version to use on her own, and she thought other people with impaired vision would want one, too. The idea of creating a new device did not intimidate her: though she is not a scientist or engineer, she works at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 8216;8216;I was convinced it would work,8217;8217; she said, though she added, 8216;8216;At first people were really, really suspicious.8217;8217;

She and a team of MIT students collaborated with the machine8217;s inventor, Robert W. Webb, a researcher at Harvard and the Massachusetts General Hospital. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration paid for part of the project. The result is what Goldring calls a seeing machine, a smaller, simpler desktop device that cost less than 4,000 to build. It consists of a projector, computer, monitor, eyepiece and a joystick for zooming in and out. It uses light-emitting diodes instead of a laser.

Ten people with severely impaired vision tried out the prototype as part of a pilot study, Goldring said. Most had diabetes or macular degeneration, which is becoming more common as the population ages. The patients used the seeing machine to look at words and navigate through virtual architectural models. She and her colleagues described the pilot study in a recent article in a medical journal, Optometry.

But no seeing machines are available for sale yet. 8216;8216;Ten patients is great, but we need to do a large-scale test of the machine,8217;8217; Goldring said. Webb agreed that more testing was needed but said he thought the machine would ultimately be useful to only a small minority of people with low vision. Even with the seeing machine, people with badly damaged retinas will not be able to read normally. Most can see only three or four letters at a time or tiny bits of a picture, and even that can be hard and slow. For people with vision like hers, she said, words like book and door can be almost indecipherable because the letters b or d followed by o create a weird visual effect. For that reason, Goldring created a 8216;8216;visual language8217;8217; that combines letters and simple pictures to represent hundreds of nouns and verbs. For example, the word book is a b, the outline of an open book and then a k. Door is a d, the outline of a doorway and then an r.

The machine might allow people to study the layout of places they are about to visit, to make it easier to get around. Goldring said she tried this, asking students to videotape the interior of a building at MIT that she had never entered. 8216;8216;It was too complicated, but I looked and looked,8217;8217; she said. 8216;8216;Then I went by myself. My sense of confidence was something entirely different.8217;8217;

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She has also been using the machine to help her create artwork that she calls 8216;8216;retina prints8217;8217;, impressionistic, digital portraits of the world as she sees it, superimposed on faint images of structures of the retina, her own and other people8217;s. DENISE GRADY