Meet the Indian-origin founders of company making AI glasses for vision-impaired

Envision founders Karthik Mahadevan and Karthik Kannan are graduates of the College of Engineering, Guindy, in Chennai. (Images: www.letsenvision.com and LinkedIn)

Two executives of Indian origin are behind a company that is developing smart glasses for vision-impaired people. Envision, which is based in The Netherlands, also has an app offering customers a host of visual recognition features.

The company describes its glasses as “AI (artificial intelligence) for your eye”. They provide wearers benefits like detailed descriptions of the settings they are in, ability to make video calls and turn text into speech.

Envision glasses are equipped with an eight-megapixel camera, Wifi and Bluetooth , USB audio and battery life of up to six hours.

The glasses cost 3,268.91 euros (over Rs 2.7 lakh), according to the envision website.

The founders of Envision, Karthik Kannan and Karthik Mahadevan, say they are passionate about computer vision and designing tools that empower people.

Both of them are graduates of the College of Engineering, Guindy, in Chennai.

Mahadevan went on to obtain a Master’s degree from the Delft University of Technology in Netherlands.

Mahadevan developed the Envision smartphone app during a college project, according to Forbes magazine. For his Master’s degree, he had been looking into accessibility hurdles faced by vision-impaired people.

From Envision app users came the idea of putting that technology into a pair of glasses, Pierre Kegels, Envision’s commercial director, told Forbes magazine.

“(They) told us how nice it would be to have all this functionality but to be able to carry out activities hands-free at the same time,” he added. “A lot of blind people navigate with guide dogs or canes in their hand. Having to flip out a phone to accomplish all these tasks is far from ideal and we knew smart glasses would make things a great deal easier.”