Step inside the MIT lab designing new human-computer interfaces

"A collection of smart devices may not make you smarter. There seems to be a gap between what technology has to offer and what we are naturally able to do" Suranga Nanayakkara slips a black ring onto his finger and points. This ring, he explains, helps visually impaired people read by converting text into speech. Nanayakkara points at a poster on the wall more than a metre away, clicks a small button on the side of the ring, and almost instantaneously a female voice starts reading out the poster's header through the headphones he's wearing. Such optical character recognition technology, or OCR, already exists but is often locked inside clunky highlighter-style devices that are slow and cumbersome.