Most people can go to the movies with the singular worry that they will not like the actual film. Yet, thousands of other people around the world with hearing impairment will not be able to enjoy the movies because of the difficulty involved with following the story. They must wait until closed captioning services become available. Fortunately, there are new closed captioning glasses that have been developed to allow people with hearing loss to enjoy the films. We will take a look at various aspects of these tools.
How Access Glasses Work?
The access glasses, as they have been dubbed by Sony Entertainment, can be customized to help the user have a much better time at the movies. They can be adjusted for brightness settings as well as the particular lightness of the movie. The glasses can also be changed to make up for any unusual angles that you may sit at in the theater.
After the film starts, the sensors on the glasses pick up information that is sent to them from the projector room, and then displays the captions in front of your face. The captioning text will look as if it is floating in your visual field, allowing you to watch the movie while you read the captions.
Conceptual Work
Randy Smith, a chief administrative officer with the Regal Cinemas, has tried to find a solution for closed captioning glasses for many years. He has worked with his son, who suffers from hearing loss, in order to test the usability and features of many different types that have appeared on the market in the past decade. He feels that the 6,000 screens which are using the glasses is a great step forward in the process for bringing closed captioning systems to all theaters.
Location
For this summer the glasses are on a trail run at 6,000 different screens in Regal Theaters across the nation. Nobody has spoken as to how long this trial phase is going to last, but people still have high hopes about the implementation. Some have also conjectured that there will be a direct link between the amount of customers that they have in the theater asking for them, and how many will be ordered.
Comfort For All
The glasses are made with the user’s comfort in mind. The idea is to help them sit on their head for a long period of time without becoming too cumbersome. They fit just like any other pair of glasses and have sensors on both sides of the rims which are used to pick up the captions. They can fit just about anyone’s head and they have been made so that they fit over existing glasses.