While with his family over Christmas in December 2021, Dan Scarfe noticed his 97-year-old hearing impaired grandfather struggled to follow conversations in real time. "It's got to the point now where he literally just sits in silence," Scarfe described to Euronews." I thought, well, hang on a second. He watches TV all the time with subtitles. Why can't we subtitle the world?"
From that spark of an idea, Scarfe assembled a company to develop AR (augmented reality) glasses. The glasses have a microphone that takes in audio from the environment and sends it to a connected mobile phone. The phone then creates closed captions from that audio, and with Nreal software, projects the subtitles into the world. The conversation data, Scarfe asserts, would be fully owned by the user, and only be stored on the user's personal devices, as opposed to in a cloud. Scarfe's company, XRAI Glass, launched its service for the first time, to 100 beta testers on 29 July 2022.
This short video shows the emotional moment a person with impaired hearing tries out the glasses for the first time...