21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa

Many of the world’s people suffer difficulties in reading. Dyslexia, an illness that hinders learning, makes reading a painful, slow process and can cause reading errors. Other people also suffer reading difficulties, such as people who, even with glasses, have weak eyes and foreign visitors to lands where their mother tongue is not spoken. The OTON GLASS resolves such problems by converting visual written information to aural voice information. Characters read by a camera positioned at the eyes are converted to text data using character recognition technology then read aloud aurally, thus enabling the user to grasp the content. Our ultimate aim is to make the OTON GLASS available for practical use. During the next year, our goal is to productize our device in small volume production. As a parallel activity, we want to collaborate with companies and art museums in seeking out the potential of the OTON GLASS as a device aiding human perception.

SHIMAKAGE Keisuke

This new exhibition series begins in the Design Gallery from April 2017. Its title, “lab” is an abbreviation of the word “laboratory.” The Design Gallery venue will not only be a place for exhibiting artworks; the gallery will also open to investigation, research, and experimentation so as to exhibit the process of development. This fiscal year, two research and development projects will be presented under the theme “extending perception.”