Christopher Caulfield Researches Augmented Reality

Kayla Brown, AccessComputing Staff

AccessComputing Team member and recent Cornell graduate, Christopher Caulfield, has gained some attention for his thesis project about developing augmented reality (AR) software for people who are Deaf or hard of hearing (DHH).

Caulfield and another student, Devon Bain, created an application that could be used to caption one-on-one conversations using off the shelf AR technology. Their prototype uses computer vision and facial recognition to display captions under the speaker's face. This helps people who are DHH maintain eye contact and makes conversations more natural than when captions are displayed on a phone or tablet. AccessComputing partner Shiri Azenkot worked with the students on this project.

This is just one example of how emerging technologies can be used for accessibility.