Because of their inability to hear, it’s very difficult for the hearing impaired to properly follow day-to-day conversations. Sixteen-year-old Daniil Frants’ creation, however, looks to help deaf people with that particular conundrum, reports DNAinfo.
Created by Frants and two of his peers, the Live-Time Closed Captioning System (LTCCS) is comparable to Google Glass in that it acts as an auto-head display. Where LTCCS separates itself from Google Glass, however, is its ability to take spoken conversations and allow deaf people to see closed-captioning of those conversations.
Frants, who attends the Dwight School on the Upper West Side in New York City, came up with the idea roughly a year ago after discovering Google Glass doesn’t include such a function.
“A lot of people were wondering if Google Glass could be used for something like this,” said Frants. “And it turned out that Google Glass wasn’t really optimal for this, so I decided to make an alternative system which was dedicated to this function.”
Even though Frants was already familiar with technology, he picked up the coding necessary to bring his project to fruition, which led to Frants winning an award from New York City. This award was handed out to those whose inventions were innovative, concerned with the well-being of the community, easy to use, and able to be mass-produced.
Frants and his team won’t rest their laurels, however, as the team looks to launch an Indiegogo campaign in the following weeks in the hopes of getting its headset onto as many heads as possible. The team plans to “bring in a few more people to take care of the details,” as well as to finance production of the LTCCS. Through the Indiegogo campaign, Frants and his colleagues hope to make the headset more ergonomic while minimizing interference from other devices, among other further fine-tuning.
