Blind Bargains

#CSUN15 Audio: Meet The E-bot Portable Video Magnifier from HIMS


In this special, join James McCarthy, President of HIMS Inc. as he discusses the E-Bot portable video magnifier. The unit allows for reading, writing, and near and distance viewing, and the advanced models have OCR support. The unit has a number of options for displaying materials, including a standard monitor, an iPad, and an Android tablet demonstrated here. We thank HIMS for their generous sponsorship of our CSUN 2015 coverage. To learn more about the latest from HIMS, you can visit the HIMS website, and you can also follow HIMS on Twitter and check out their Facebook page.

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Transcript

We strive to provide an accurate transcription, though errors may occur.

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Transcribed by Kayde Rieken
Welcome to BlindBargains.com coverage of CSUN 2015: the biggest names, provocative interviews, and wall-to-wall exhibit hall coverage. Now, here's Joe Steinkamp.

Joe Steinkamp: Hello, everyone, and welcome to one of our recordings from CSUN 2015. This time out, James McCarthy of HIMS, one of our proud sponsors of our coverage, will be speaking to us about E-Bot. Note that he'll be using an Android tablet and talking about some of the changes that have happened to the unit over the past year in its release. And now we'll take you straight to the audio from CSUN 2015.

James McCarthy: My name is James McCarthy, and I'm the president of HIMS. I'm also low vision, and that's one of the reasons why I often do the presentation on our low-vision products because I'm a user of the products. Remember that commercial: "Liked the product so much, I bought the company"? Well, I liked the product, so I came to work for the company. [Laughs]

And today's session is on E-Bot. Anyone know why we named it E-Bot? What does E-Bot stand for? "Education Robot." That was the original name. And the reason is, HIMS — until this product, HIMS did not have a video magnifier that had a distance viewing, which a lot of the students in schools — a lot of the teachers, a lot of schools — want to have distance magnification products for low-vision students so they can see what's going on in the front of the room, sides of rooms. And so this was our entree product into the distant video magnification marketplace, primarily for education. That's why the project was called "Education Bot."

But these products are also for visually impaired rehabilitation clients, so it's also known as "Employment Bot." And guess what? When somebody uses it at home — like, connected to a 24-, 27-, 32- — any size monitor, as long as it has an HDMI HD port. Okay? It's a high-definition port. If you're connecting to VGA, it's not high-definition. Any product out there that connects to an external monitor using VGA is not HD. Even if their camera's in HD, the image will not be in HD if it's connected unless it's connected via HDMI. Okay? A little — some tips and — tips of the — the vision field. So for the home user who might normally use it with a larger monitor, since they're using it in the home or — we call it everybody's bot. So the E worked out great.

What I have here is the E-Bot Pro, which is the top-of-the-line model. There are two other models. Now, I'll go through the three models for you. The basic model is the E-Bot with no suffix after it — just plain E-Bot. And that's a reading, writing, and distance video magnifier. Okay.

Then we're going to go up a level, and I'll give you the primary distinguishing feature. The E-Bot Advanced is the next level up. It's our mid-level model, and it's advanced because we add OCR text to speech to it. So the camera can now be reading, writing, distance, and optical character recognition with text to speech. So it's going to read out loud. But the E-Bot Advanced — the OCR is not a full-page OCR. What it is, is — it's an image-capture OCR. What you see on the screen is what you'll hear. What you see is what it's going to read out loud — very important. Now, how much of the image can — can it capture? Generally, if it — you have the zoom of the camera set up to about 7X — and depending on the font size, depending on the — the column widths, you're going to get the whole 8 and 1/2 by 11-page across, and you'll get about 50 to 60 percent down a page. So two snapshots, if you adjust your page properly, will get you a full page. Okay? But it's a screen-capture OCR.

The next level up is the E-Bot Pro — very important to remember. We've already had people get confused between E-Bot Advanced and E-Bot Pro — our apology for confusing people by our high-tech names. A lot of people say, "Well, why isn't the Advanced the higher model if it's advanced?" We don't know why. The "Pro" stands for professional, and that's what we try to do. And the E-Bot Pro — the main difference compared to the Advanced is, it'll do a full-page scan. Okay? You can actually choose from a menu the image capture scan, or you can have a full-page scan. The E-Bot Pro actually adds an OCR camera. So the E-Bot and E-Bot Advanced only has the live video camera. The live video camera is not capable of the full-page OCR scan. That's why the Advanced model only does a screen image capture scan. But we've added the OCR camera to the E-Bot Pro, so the E-Bot Pro is two cameras. And the OCR camera is capable of the full-page scan. So from the menu, you can choose the screen capture scan — in which case it's going to take the picture from which camera?

[Audience responds in background]

JM: Live video camera. When you select the full-page scan, it's going to take the image from the OCR camera. Okay? But also, the E-Bot Pro adds motorization to the camera. It's the only motorized video magnifier for low vision on the market today. And I'll show you the motorized skills of it, and I'll show you some of the benefits to having a motor built into the camera.

Okay. Everybody understand the three models?

Audience Member: Yes.

JM: Okay. Before someone asks — before someone asks at the very end, "What's the prices?" I'll give you the prices now. [Laughs] So the E-Bot is $2,695. The E-Bot Advanced is $300 more; so that's $2,995. And the E-Bot Pro jumps up to $3,895. And in that 3,895 category, it offers multiple things more than what products priced at $3,995 used to offer. It's in that price category — just under $4,000 — but offers a lot more.

Okay. What about connectivity? What — does someone already know about connectivity with E-Bot? What does it connect to?

[Audience member responds]

JM: A monitor. Okay. [Laughs] That's a dead giveaway.

Unidentified Speaker: The right answers get chocolate bars.

JM: Yeah. Participate. Yeah, I've got a few Ghirardelli's chocolate bars for right after, so ...

[Audience member laughs]

Audience Member: iPad.

JM: iPad. All right. Give her a chocolate bar.

[Audience laughs]

JM: [Laughs] That was easy, right? What else does it connect to?

Audience Member: Laptop.

JM: What kind of laptops?

Audience Member: All?

[Other audience members respond]

JM: All? Did you say all? It'll connect to Mac — to Mac laptops or PC laptops — both. And many products in the reading, writing, and distance category only connect to PC laptops, not to Macs. I believe there's only three — maybe four — reading, writing, and distance video magnifiers that will connect to both Mac and PC laptops. Most of them connect only to PC laptops. And it also connects to a monitor. So it has the most versatile connectivity of any reading, writing, and distance video magnifier. Why? Because we're the only one that connects to tablets — iPad and Android tablets. And what did we do to connect to tablets? I'll give you a — a little history of the product.

We — when we designed the product, one of the goals we had was to be the first to connect to iOS and Android tablets; and if we could do so, it would have to be done wirelessly because you cannot just connect a video cable from an iPad or an Android tablet — from a camera into the iPad or Android. There's no video in. There's a video out. Companies had done that. They've been — there's — you just go to Wal-Mart and you buy the proper cable; go to BestBuy, buy the proper cable; and you can connect the video out from an iPad into a larger monitor. A lot of the video — the desktop video magnifier companies were doing that, and people were — "Wow! I can display my iPad on my large monitor!" You don't need a video magnifier to do that. You can — all you need is a monitor. Okay? And that's basically what we're doing with this monitor, but you would do the same thing with an iPad or an Android tablet. You can do video out, but you can't do video in. So we knew we'd have to do it wirelessly.

So the first thing we tried was Bluetooth. Guess what? Bluetooth is too slow. So the second thing we were going to try is Wi-Fi. So we looked and looked and looked, and we couldn't find any Wi-Fi chips or technology that would compress the video image. And I have the iPad — excuse me — the E-Bot facing me; and as we move, we need a dynamic image, not a static image. There was a chip on the market that you could put under a camera, snap a picture of the full page, shoot it over Wi-Fi — it would display on the monitor. Big deal. That's called a screenshot. It's called a "print screen" on your computer — simple press of a button. But nothing was dynamic. So we said, Oh, no, what are we going to do?" Well, we said, "We'll develop it." We had no idea how hard that was going to be, how many man hours it would take, how much time it would take. So the product had three starts and restarts — the project had three starts and restarts and came out about a year later. And we thought — and how we did it was over Wi-Fi. But guess what? We can't use a building's Wi-Fi, a school's Wi-Fi, a government Wi-Fi, a public Wi-Fi. Guess what? Sometimes it's fast enough, and sometimes it's not. So when there's more people on a Wi-Fi system, what does it do? It slows down. The signal strength goes down. So what would be happening is, when the signal strength was high, we'd have a good image. Signal strength is low, the image starts to fade. The characteristics start to fade. You don't get good contrast. You may — may not even switch image modes. You may not even change magnification modes. There may be a delay in changing. So we said, "Oh, we've got to control the — the signal strength."

So the first thing we did — we put a dedicated Wi-Fi chip — so E-Bot is its own Wi-Fi network. Okay? We don't need anybody's Wi-Fi. We can go under a tree, and we can use it. Okay? In the college campus — school campus, Going, "I want to read under a tree." Okay. Take your E-Bot and take your iPad. So the first thing we did was, we established our own dedicated Wi-Fi. So it is a hotspot; it is an access point. But it's not a network in the way you think of in Internet. You cannot access anything else other than an E-Bot-compatible device that has our E-Bot viewer on it. Okay?

The second thing we had to grapple with was the dynamic speed because of the movement. So we had to do a lot of video compression technology, and we had to compress the video so that every movement of the paper or every movement of the camera could be recorded very quickly, compressed, shot over the Wi-Fi, decompressed, displayed on the screen — and the eye would not know that there was any change other than the movement of some characteristic on the screen. Or when we changed any features from — in the case of E-Bot and E-Bot Advanced, you can change features from the back control panel; or in the case of the E-Bot Advanced and E-Bot Pro, you have a remote control. Or if you're connected to an iPad, Android, or even a Windows device like the Microsoft Surface, you can use touchscreen gestures. And whenever you made these changes, we needed to make sure that the compression speed was fast enough. So it took a lot of compressing and recompressing and more compressing. And we actually have a probably very marketable technology in terms of our compression technology. So that's what we had to do to — to get this working wirelessly.

So you see it on the screen now. Actually, right now it's just on a — I'll just pull it over so we have all the text. It's actually looking at a page, looking at the E-Bot brochure. How about if we pass out the E-Bot brochures at this point? I think the audience — those of you with vision, anyway — can probably multi-task. You can look over a few features. That way, if you — if I don't mention something and you happen to have read about it, and you'd like me to elaborate — more than happy to do it. So let's pass out the brochure, and you'll know what the E-Bot is looking at.

So we can actually — this is the Pro. So the Pro does not have the buttons on the back control panel. We have to install some additional electronics. We only make one size of E-Bot, so all of the E-Bots are the same size, although the Pro will weigh a little more because it has the extra camera and it has the motor for it built in. So it's going to weigh about a pound — 1.2 pounds more. Okay? But other than that, they're the same structure. So because the back panels are all the same and we had to put additional hardware electronics into it, there's no room for the buttons. So we don't have the back control panel as the user interface in the Pro. So I'll use our remote for now. So we can actually increase size. Let me turn on the voice. It has a built-in voice guide.

[The E-Bot chimes.]

JM: There it is. Okay. The power just needed to be reset, I think.

[The voice begins speaking volume increments.]

JM: There we go.

[James adjusts the zoom to 10 with audible feedback.]

JM: Okay. So it has a built-in voice guide. And here's a tough question: Anyone know why we built the voice guide into the E-Bot. Think about how we go about using it. Think about how other products on the market work. Okay. The hint is, other products only have the OCR text to speech to —

Audience Member: Internet.

JM: — a laptop or a PC. Comment was ...

Audience Member: No. Sorry.

JM: Okay. Why? Because it's using the power of the computer; it's using the voice of the computer. So you're limited for OCR text to speech. In our case, doesn't matter what device you're connecting to — a laptop, an iPad, an Android, a monitor — just a monitor, stand-alone monitor. You always can have your OCR text to speech. So that's why we put the voice in.

But in addition to that reason, guess what? It gives you a secondary — or reinforcement. So when I zoom, it tells me ...

[The E-Bot announces a zoom level of 11.]

JM: ... what level I'm at.

[The E-Bot announces a zoom level of 12.]

JM: Okay. What is the zoom telling me —

[The E-Bot announces a zoom level of 15.]

JM: Trick question — is that the magnification level? No. Why? Because monitor size is one of the determinates of magnification. And of course we're talking linear magnification, not optical. So right now we have it connected to a 15-inch monitor. If this were a 17-inch monitor, I know the measurement. It's 1.4X to 69X. If it's a 9.7-inch iPad, it's .8X — so under 1X, .8X — to 35X. When it's connected to a 24-inch monitor, it's 2.2X to 97X. Okay? That's the range. It has 60 zoom levels. And the zoom is referring to the zoom of the camera. The camera's got 60 zoom levels. Okay? So that's one thing that's very important: The zoom level is not the magnification. But it's sort of irrelevant on a functional basis. If somebody generally reads at zoom 12, then it's — 12 is their size for most materials on this size screen. So if they connect to a different device with a smaller or larger screen they know, smaller screen — I might have to move the zoom up a few levels. Larger screen — I might want to take it down a few levels to get to my normal comfortable reading size. Okay?

We can change images. I was having — as you saw me fiddling with the direction of the E-Bot, it was because of these overhead spotlights. They can sometimes shine right down, and it oversaturates given that we already have a — a built-in LCD. Most cameras in this category don't have a built-in — did I say LCD? I think I did. It's a built-in LED light that's built around the camera. We have four points of light. Most products in this category don't have a built in LED light. We do. You can turn it on or off. So when you're taken to different environments that have different overhead lights, then — or if you're in a darker area, you can use the lights, not use the lights. So that's what we're experimenting with. And we're trying all kinds of angles. What we should have actually tried was the angle like a user. [Laughs] If I sat behind this table, I'd be using E-Bot like a user right now. Okay. So we should have tried the obvious first, but I didn't. And so we can change image modes, and I'm just pressing the image —

[The E-Bot announces black on white.]

JM: So that's the image mode button. Let me just get more text on there so you can see it. Let me make it just a little larger.

[The E-Bot announces a zoom level of 27 and an image mode of grayscale.]

JM: So grayscale — there's your black and white photo mode.

[The E-Bot announces yellow on black; yellow on blue; green on black; and natural color.]

JM: Natural color is your full color mode, looking at color images.

[The E-Bot announces white on black.]

JM: Now, there's also 40 levels of contrast, so I could take contrast up or down from 1 to 40. And what I'm doing is, I'm actually using the middle section of the — of the remote control. Okay. Most products don't have a remote controller, by the way, too. You have to just use controls on the unit or the controls off of your laptop. Okay? This has a remote control.

So I was using the middle section. The top section is for navigation; the middle section is for your video magnifier features; your bottom section is for OCR. So even though it looks like we have a dozen or so buttons on here, when you separate it into the three sections, very simple. But what do I want to do? Navigate? I'd use the top. What do I want to do? Change a video magnification feature? I use the middle. What do I want to do? OCR? I'll use the bottom.

Okay. So the E-Bot Pro — because it has a motor, one of the things we can do is — portable units normally don't have an X-Y moving tray like the desktops do. Why? I'm full of whys, aren't I? I'm like a 2-year-old. Because we want to save the weight; we want to save the bulk so it's portable, or transportable. So what we've done, which no one else has done — because the camera's motorized, we gave you a joystick. And we can move — you saw me moving image before, but we can read across the line. I won't use the Return button because it's preset to a certain position. I didn't change it from what we were using in the exhibit hall. And we can go back using our joystick. Slower ... faster ... We can read across the next line. If we needed to we could move down, or we could move up, and just read across. Try the joystick — see how sensitive it is — and you'll get a candy bar for that. [Laughs]

[Audience laughs]

Audience Member: Is there an automatic viewing mode?

JM: There is. There's a button called Auto, and you can press the Auto. You can set the speed of the auto-reading mode in the menu. There's various speeds. And — that's if you can read automatically. A lot of people can't. Normal words, short words, we can read. When you're low-vision and you come across a long word, a foreign word, a long name of a person, you get stuck. So you end up taking control again, you know, with the joystick, or stopping it. And you can pause, and you can resume, even in auto mode; but you kind of have to learn the skill of using auto mode.

[The E-Bot announces zoom level 26, then 25.]

JM: There we go. Experimenting. [Laughs] All right. Candy bar.

Audience Member: [Laughs]

JM: Okay. So it's real easy. Did you find the joystick too sensitive?

Audience Member: Uh-uh.

JM: No? And we're still in the slow mode at the moment. There are faster modes, two — there's three — three levels right now, so you can actually set your joystick sensitivity within those three levels.

Audience Member: Okay.

JM: We may add more levels, depending on market — you know, customer feedback. We'll see. This — you know, one thing with HIMS I'll point out: You buy the E-Bot today; when we come up with firmware updates, it updates over Wi-Fi. And remember: We're Wi-Fi. So we can have E-Bot do dedicated things. As long as it's dedicated to the E-Bot, we can have it do things with its Wi-Fi. And one thing is: We come up with a firmware update; it'll update over Wi-Fi, its own Wi-Fi. Okay? And all updates from HIMS are free — always have been, always will be. We're a company in our industry that pioneered free firmware updates, no SMAs, no software maintenance agreements. Okay?

Audience Member: Question.

JM: Yes?

Audience Member: Have — have you tried for three-dimensional objects?

JM: I beg your pardon?

Audience Member: Have you tried the three-dimensional objects?

JM: Absolutely. No problem. We put pill bottles under it as you would with any video magnifier. We put pill bottles under it, jewelry, coins — you know, we've got coin collectors, people wanting to see details in jewelry — no problem. You may have to adjust settings. Sometimes the jewelry might be better in the photo mode, the black-and-white, grayscale photo mode. Other times, in full color it might look better. You may have to change the contrast settings. So you might have to do some experimentation with objects.

Audience Member: And —

JM: Absolutely. And if you have a 3-D object, you want to try it at the end of the session, feel free.

Audience Member: And you can control your focus through joystick also?

JM: The focus, no. The focus is an automatic focus.

Audience Member: It's an auto — okay.

JM: Yeah. You can actually turn it — turn the auto-focus off. There's a combination of buttons.

Audience Member: All right.

JM: You can turn it off, and then you can manually go up or down on — move the lens up or down to manually focus. So if you think you might be able to get a better focus than the built-in auto-focus, you can take it into manual focus mode and try it using the up and down arrows. Then you have to remember to take it out of manual focus, put it back into auto-focus; otherwise, you end up calling our tech support line saying, "It won't focus!" [Laughs]

Audience Member: [Laughs]

JM: There is an easy way — if you get lost, things aren't working, the first thing you do is you go into our menu; you go to initialization, and you can initialize — which is a reset — the entire unit, the reading camera only, or the OCR function only. Which — obviously, if you only reset the video — the live video camera or the OCR camera, it resets quicker, in about ten seconds. If you reset the whole system, it's basically — you powered off and powered back on — it's equivalent to that — and it's going to take about 30 seconds because it's going to reload everything.

Audience Member: There's a question to your left.

JM: Yes? Question?

Audience Member: Oh. I — I think it's almost answered. But with the — with the fact that it auto focuses if you're looking at, say, jewelry, you can actually magnify it with the joystick, or was that also manual?

JM: You don't magnify with the joystick; you navigate with the joystick.

Audience Member: Oh. Okay.

JM: Yeah. You pan and tilt in distance mode; you move left, right, up, or down on your page when you're in reading mode. You magnify using the up and down arrows just below the joystick. Okay? When you're using the touch gestures of an iPad or an Android tablet, you can actually just use a pinch and spread to magnify.

Audience Member: Yeah.

JM: And I'll show you that in a moment. Okay. Let's go ahead and go to distance mode. Let me see — I actually can turn this around successfully. I don't like to play with it once it's set up, especially during a presentation; but we'll give it a try. Okay. I'm going to focus it out there at one of you. Okay? And whoever it lands on, you get a candy bar. How about that?

Audience member: [Laughs]

JM: All right. So press the Distance button.

[The E-Bot announces distance view.]

JM: See the camera moving by itself? That's from the motor.

Audience Member: It's facing front.

JM: Oops.

[The E-Bot announces zoom 35.]

JM: And we'll change the contrast a bit.

[The E-Bot announces contrast 40.]

JM: You never look good magnified. This monitor is not the greatest for the color. When you come down to our exhibit booth, or if you look at it on a tablet, you can see the color a lot better. So who am I zooming on? You get a candy bar. Michelle? [Laughs] Find who we're zooming on. Raise your hand. Can you see?

Audience Member: Can't see.

JM: No one's screamed yet.

Audience Member: I can't see it.

Audience Member: Yeah, we can't tell.

JM: You can't tell?

Audience Member: We can't tell.

Audience Member: No.

Audience Member: Sunglasses on her head. Right there. [Laughs]

JM: Raise your — raise your hand. Move your hand in front of your face.

[Audience laughs]

JM: It's a little difficult — you know, like I say, when you come to the booth — if you come to the booth, we can zoom in on various things in the exhibit hall. You can zoom in on close; you can zoom in on far. The zoom is 60X, so you'll be able to see far. I had this at someone's home. I had no idea what was across the street. We zoomed out. It turned out it was a pasture. We were zooming on cows. You know, I mean, must have been a hundred yards away. So we were zooming in on cows.

Okay. So we can bring it back. Now, one of the features on — you can press it, and it'll come back to reading mode. We just press the viewer button.

[The E-Bot speaks.]

JM: Now, one of the features — besides being able to read, like, left, right, up, down — the joystick, right? — one of the — and when we're in distance mode, we can pan around the room. One of the other features is that it remembers its location in reading mode, and it remembers its settings in distance mode. So for example — what word do we have on the screen? Or let's get a word on the screen here. Okay. This word here, that word there. Okay. One hour — one touch. Okay. We'll just position this a little bit. Okay. We'll position "one touch" right there. Let's go to distance mode. Remember how all other products work in the market? They're manual, not motorized. We're the — E-Bot's the only product with a motor. So the student or worker or someone at home would have to grab the camera, take it manually from the reading position, move it forward, find what they're looking at, pan around. Then, when they want to come back to the reading position, they have to come back to where they are. Well, how do they know where they were? Okay. They would have to know — "Okay. I was reading here where it says 'one touch.'" And whereabout is that on the — on the page, or it's — and so they move their finger, and they plop their finger down there, and they say, "It's about there on the page." Then they move it to distance, then they come back and try and fumble around to find their place. What we do is take it to distance ...


[The E-Bot announces distance view.]

JM: Okay. The student's listening to the teacher or the presenter the whole time.

Audience Member: Question before you go back.

JM: Yep.

Audience Member: Do you have a freeze frame in the distance view? I mean, can I —

JM: Yes, we do.

Audience Member: — save images?

JM: Yes, you can capture an image.

Audience Member: All right. Awesome.

JM: And distance view, it doesn't capture live; it captures to the SD card directly. So that's something — we'll be speaking with engineering about — about the concept. There are customers so far that have expressed an interest — if they can do a live capture, then — from the live capture, then they can save it to the SD card. That's one of the features that we have, is an SD card slot; and you can save your OCR scans, and you can save your captured images to an SD card. So we're going to be looking at that.

So right now, the captured image in distance mode — or in reading mode, for that matter — are both direct saves to the SD card. We'll see if we can make an addition and allow it to be saved to the live screen.

Audience Member: So when you're saying — when you say that — save to SD — you mean I can't immediately pull that back up and look —

JM: You can, but you'd — you'd have to go into the menu, and you go to your saved images; and then you can pull it right back up. Yeah.

Audience Member: Okay. But you're saying, what you want to do is — is make it so that it'll — even though I just saved it, I can still see it live?

JM: Yeah. What we — I — from a low-Vision user's point of view, it would be best if we could capture the image —

Audience Member: Right.

JM: — on the screen; see it live; and then we could decide to save it or not save it.

Audience Member: Right. Because you might not have got a good shot.

JM: Correct.

Audience Member: Yeah. I'm thinking about sitting in a — in a math class and their teacher's explaining a problem on the screen.

JM: Mm-hmm.

Audience Member: I want to take shots of each step, you know.

JM: Mm-hmm.

Audience Member: And have them to save to look at later on.

JM: Well, you should know what your shot is because you will see, you know, what you have on your screen before you capture it.

Audience Member:Yeah, Right.

JM: So you should be able to know what your shot's going to be.

JM: But it would be nice if you could just capture it first and then manipulate it. Because you can manipulate it once it's — once it's captured, too. You can resize it, you can change the image mode. So it would be nice if you could capture it live first, and then you could do any manipulation to it in size and image mode, etc. — contrast level — and then save it.

Audience Member: Can you manipulate the saved image?

Audience Member: Yeah.

JM: Yes, from a device, a computer device. You can manipulate it within —

Audience Member: Oh, but not from the E-Bot.

JM: You can manipulate it within the features of the E-Bot; but if you want to manipulate it even more, then you put it in a computer.

Audience Member: Yeah.

Audience Member: Okay.

JM: And you can do a whole lot of things with images, yeah.

Audience Member: Sure.

Audience Member: Is it a JPEG, then, that it's saved as?

JM: Saves as a JPEG. I know there's some HIMS staff in the back. Does it save in other formats other than JPEG off-hand? I think it might. Or is JPEG the only — maybe they left. Many of — well, they have meetings — international dealer meetings — and so they're coming and going. We have — we've got about 15 staff here.

Audience Member: Yeah. Right.

JM: So I know it saves in JPEG because that's how I always save it. I'm not sure if it saves in any other format.

Audience Member: Okay.

JM: It won't save as a text file.

Audience Member: Well, right.

JM: Right.

Audience Member: So it does make pictures? No live video or video —

JM: Will not do a live video recording, no. That is something on our specifications list, and hopefully we can get to that down the road — live video. Because that would also be important. Let's — let's take a situation that a teacher's filled the room up with math equations, math formulas; and at the end of the class, it would be nice to just video the whole whiteboard.

Audience Member: Yeah.

JM: You know? So that is something — we had that in the original specification; but then, when we got — you know, we first try to design the basics, and we get to the more complex things later in the development. And we found out, later in the development, a few things; and I'm not sure what our reason was for non-video. It might have been the — some of the programming code and the path that the programming code took that we were not able to do the live video recording; or it could have been, we began consuming too much memory in this — with all the — all the features, and we wouldn't have enough memory to have that feature available and work properly like consumers would expect it to. But one of those two reasons, if not both — we weren't able to put that feature in at this time. Remember: We're going to be coming out with continual firmware updates; so as long as the hardware will support it, the software — we will continue to manipulate and finesse more features into it.

Audience Member: Question in the back.
JM: Yep.
Audience Member: I was wondering — so can you — if you're connected to a laptop, can you just save it to the laptop instead of the SD card?

JM: Absolutely. You can —

Audience Member: And then —

JM: — save it, yep. Use the power of your laptop. Use the memory of your laptop. Absolutely.

Audience Member: And then the other question is, do you have a split screen where you can have, like, your Word document up and running on your laptop while you're looking at distance viewing —

JM: Absolutely. Mm-hmm. And it's compatible with ZoomText, although I've heard that we're having a few minor problems; but we're in contact with Ai Squared, and both of us are trying to work up little things. But it is compatible with ZoomText, so you could also use it with ZoomText and use the ZoomText feature to — to split the screen, which — many times, people with low vision might want to have ZoomText running as well as their video magnifier and split the screen so both images will have large print. But nowadays, with a lot of the accessibility features on laptops, you can get a little bit of magnification. And there's also people with low vision that might want the print enlarged; but on the computer, the computer screen works fine for them at normal size or just a few larger fonts. So there's a lot of options there for split screen. And window and window will work, too. You can often set up the window and window and shape each window. Doesn't have to be a horizontal or vertical split. Also, you can screenshot it onto your — like, your — I use an iPad, usually. And everybody knows the trick, right? Home button and power button at the same time will screenshot it and save directly into your photos. Yeah. So you just do that. So we didn't even have to develop the feature for laptops or computers. We didn't have to develop the capture feature for — for tablets because the computers and the tablets have that feature. Good questions.

I keep talking about a tablet. Let me go ahead and connect a tablet. I happen to have a Samsung here which I've never used before. They wanted to keep the iPads at the exhibit booth, so I'm going to try this. And okay. So we've already set up the Wi-Fi; so if we went into our settings and our Wi-Fi, we will see E-Bot. In fact, many of you — if you have a phone or a tablet you can go into your Wi-Fi, and you'll see that E-Bot is listed, just like any other Wi-Fi device would be listed. Okay? So you'll — you'll see it. Your neighbor will see it. Other students in class will see it. Teacher can see it. But only the user that has the E-Bot Viewer app will actually be able to access the E-Bot. So the viewers are free. You can download them from the Apple store or the Google market. You know, so if, at a school, you have five low-vision students, you'd like all five of them to be able to use the one E-Bot, you can do that. You can download the app into all five iPads, and they can come into a resource room and use it. But only one student can use it at a time. It's a single-user interface right now. There's no broadcast capability to it. So we cannot broadcast the one E-Bot to five iPads. Can't — can't do that right now. Also a feature we're considering. How we doing on time?

Audience Member: I think we need to wrap up.

JM: Okay. So let me just get it here. So I'm going to launch the app. Okay. You see HIMS. The screen goes away; the tablet will take over. And ...

[The E-Bot chimes.]

Audience Member: You could also walk around with your iPad.

JM: That's possible. Here we are.

Audience member: The cooler thing, I think, is you can

Audience Member: Yeah. Yeah.

[The E-Bot announces zoom 10.]

JM: Michelle, can you just make a — why don't you come up here, and I'll — I'll keep speaking if you try and get the image. There you go.

Michelle: Okay. I think it's working.

Audience Member: Yeah, you're just in distance.

JM: Oh, okay. So go back to reading, yeah. That's what we were doing.

[The E-Bot announces review.]

JM: And so — so we can just get it — so the image should be right on the — on the — not the iPad, but the Samsung Galaxy right now.

Audience Member: There it is.

JM: Okay. And it's wireless. So yeah, you're right; we can walk around with it.

[James adjusts the zoom level to 28.]

JM: So I'll take it over. If you could control that for now.

Audience Member: Sure.

JM: So the distance is about 30, 50 feet. Okay? That's — that's a Wi-Fi thing; it's not a — not a HIMS E-Bot thing. But I can go ahead and use the pinch and spread.

[The E-Bot announces zoom 37.]

JM: Enlarge it.

[The E-Bot announces zoom 44.]

JM: I can decrease it.

[The E-Bot announces zoom 35.]

JM: Okay. We'll just -

[The E-Bot announces zoom 42.]

JM: Okay.

[The E-Bot announces zoom 48.]

JM: Now, we could also —

[The E-Bot announces zoom 38.]

JM: We can bring on — so the — you can do with the touchscreen all that we can do with the remote. So I just swipe in from the left side — from the right side, and I got my E-Bot icons. Okay? So I can change the image mode. Whoops. Think I lost this for some reason — there we go. Bring my — okay. We can change image modes. I think I pressed something wrong here. I don't understand Androids. Michelle does. [Laughs] I apologize. I was fighting with them. "Gimme that iPad!"

Michelle: Okay.

JM: I think I went to some other — some other screen. All right. So from the —

[The E-Bot announces previous color.]

JM: — I should be able to —

[The E-Bot announces black on white, then grayscale, then yellow on black.]

JM: And I can go forward or backward through my colors. We can auto — you mentioned about auto-scroll.

Audience Member: Right.

JM: We actually have a function on here — an icon for auto. We can OCR. Let's hear it OCR. So let's take the size down. Michelle, can you take the size down small, to about 4X? About 4X, 5, 6?

[The E-Bot announces zoom levels of 26, 16, then 6.]

JM: Okay. Then move it over a little to get — so we don't have the graphics that — it knows it won't scan the graphics. If you want to move it this way for me. It doesn't want to move? Let's see if I can —

[The E-Bot announces a zoom level of 5.]

JM: Oh, you know why? It's a little small.

Michelle: They're fighting with —

JM: Yeah, go ahead and take

Michelle: — the paper.

JM: Oh, just move the paper. That's good.

Michelle: Yeah. [Laughs]

JM: Okay. Let's see if we can —

[The E-Bot announces a zoom level of 4.]

Michelle: They're going to use the other camera. Hang on. I think they're going to kick us out —

JM: Okay. So let's go ahead and just do an OCR.

[The E-Bot announces previous color, then gives the OCR instruction "Press again to capture."]

JM: Okay. We have to move our page. Okay. Now we have our whole page in, and I'll just bring my scanner back.

[The E-Bot announces full-size OCR.]

JM: It's going to take a picture.

[The E-Bot makes a camera shutter sound, then begins beeping.]

JM: The beeping — it's thinking, translating. Then it'll begin reading. And you can come to our booth, 705, 805, right across the front on the far left side of the exhibit hall; and we can experiment more, even with your documents. It's calculating the whole page. It shows you a progress bar on the screen.

Audience Member: The backlight is not helping.

JM: Maybe.

Audience Member: It had big glare spots on the screen.

Audience member: Yeah, it did.

Audience member: Yeah, there's — the lighting in here is really —

JM: Okay. It could be that because it is a little long. Normally, it won't — it'll take about 5 to 20 seconds at most, and I think it might be a little — approaching 20 seconds. If we came through the exhibit — I'm going to stop it.

AUDIENCE Member: The lights downstairs —

JM: Oh, yeah. It — it aborted action.

[The E-Bot begins reading a garbled version of the document.]


JM: Oh, there we go. Had a problem. [Laughs] Okay. I stopped it.

Joe Steinkamp: That song's by Hanson, isn't it? "Eem-Bot." E-Bot.

JM: [Laughs] Come to the exhibit booth. I mean, we still have lighting issues — you know, the high overheads and everything — but you'll see that it's working very well. One of the things we have in the exhibit booth is, we have a graphic of — I guess more like a blackboard — with various examples of math and English and so forth. So you can point it as if you're in a — a classroom. We're about 16 feet away, and you can experiment with the zooming and so forth. Now, it will only OCR scan when it's in reading mode. It won't OCR in distance, at least not right now.

Audience Member: Right.

JM: So that's another important distinction. Question?

Audience Member: Do you have any plans to save — scan the file into the iPad?

JM: To save a file into the iPad?

Audience Member: Yeah.

Audience Member: The text?

JM: Right now, you cannot do that. Right now, all you can do is capture the image and save it as a JPEG into the folders — folder. So any plans to do it? Yes. We will be experimenting with saving it right into text. We will be looking at that.

Audience Member: We hope so.

JM: Yeah, we hope so. It would be nice to do it because that way, you could capture an image in text, drop it directly into a Word file, Word document, and — you know, so it's like a cut and paste, is all you're doing. And then you could manipulate it from there — edit, you know, change fonts. So you could do a lot.

Audience Member: Yeah.

JM: So it would be nice if you could just drop text right into a document, yeah. I know with — you can drop — you know, we're working on things like, you know, having a spreadsheet and then dropping it in, you know, to Excel. But when you do that, you lose your formulas and so forth. So there's a lot that we — we're — we have on the — on the schedule to do, but not a lot of it's easy. Yeah.

Okay. Thank you very much. We'll see you down in the exhibit hall.

Audience Member: Question.

Audience Member: One more question.

JM: Yes?

Audience Member: Question about the Wi-Fi — you say it is a Wi-Fi of its own, but you can — the Wi-Fi of the E-Bot connects to the Wi-Fi in school or at home for the updates, then? Or how do I get, through Wi-Fi, my updates?

JM: For the update? No, they — it's a dedicated Wi-Fi, but all you do is go into the menu, which — and I swipe — to get the E-Bot icons, I swipe from the right side. If you swipe from the left side, you bring the E-Bot menu on. So go to the E-Bot menu and the Options menu, which is your default menu. We go down to Information — no. Yeah. We go down to Information, and one of the options will be Update. You select Update. It tells you what version you have, so you scroll down to latest version. Do you want to update a new version? You select it. And then it asks you how you want to do it. You can also —

[The E-Bot announces movement unavailable.]

JM: You can also do it by a USB connection from a computer. Let's assume you downloaded the — the file off — onto an SD card and you downloaded it into your computer. You can connect directly from your computer into E-Bot to — to update. But to do it by Wi-Fi, you just select Wi-Fi, and the camera automatically goes and searches for — for the link at our website. So it's programmed to do that.

Audience Member: But — through which Wi-Fi, then?

JM: Through — through the E-Bot's built-in Wi-Fi. Uh-huh.

Audience Member: But it connects to your own —

JM: It connects to our own website. Exactly. We got it to link with our own website to go and collect the latest link.

Audience Member: Yeah, but that's your home Wi-Fi. But it's your —

Audience Member: So he's wondering, how does E-Bot connect to his home Wi-Fi to get to the Internet?

JM: Oh, it doesn't. E-Bot will never — never go to the Internet.

Audience Member: Yeah, but how can it get to the update, then?

JM: How can it get the update? By Wi-Fi. It goes to our website.

Audience Member: Yeah, but it has no Internet, so ...

JM: We've directly programmed it to do that. [Laughs] The — the Wi-Fi chips allow us to do some direct programming. But I mean, directly giving it — the E-Bot viewer — so for your laptops and your iPads and Androids, we given it a code, just like — you can sort of say — think of it as, we've given it an app to go to our website; but the app is built in. It's transparent to the user. We've built an app to go to our website, look for the latest update, and then update automatically over Wi-Fi.

Audience Member: So you have to have your computer open to do the update on your website.

JM: No.

Audience Member: No?

JM: We can — all we need to have is our — our E-Bot on. And we don't even have to have a monitor because remember, the voice guide will speak you through the menus and everything. Or you could connect a monitor up so you could see it as well. And as long as you select the — the Wi-Fi update option, it will go out to our website automatically.

Audience Member: But it has to — it has to have Internet.

Audience Member: Does it have 4G, or does it go —

JM: Yeah, you're right. I mean, technically you're right. It is a Wi-Fi network. It does really have Internet. But we restricted it to only our instructions. Yeah, you're technically right. Technically, it is an Internet-accessible network. [Laughs] We try not to say that because, you know —

Audience Member: So when I use it with my iPad, I don't have an Internet connection on my iPad, then?

JM: That's correct.

Audience Member: So I cannot do two things together.

JM: That's correct.

Audience Member: If one student wants to look something on the Internet while he is using E-Bot Pro, it —

JM: That's correct.

Audience Member: — doesn't work.

JM: So they need to press the Home button to exit the E-Bot viewer, go to the Internet.

Audience Member: Connect to —

JM: Then, when they want to go back to E-Bot, exit the Internet, go back to E-Bot viewer. That's correct. Something else that we're going to be working on. We need Apple's help and Google's help to — to do — to do that, to allow two simultaneous Internet —

Audience Member: Yeah. Okay.

JM: Yep.

Audience Member: With the limited screen size of the iPad, too, I think if you're doing something where you're switching back and forth from the Internet to your magnified image, you might want to be on a PC anyway.

Joe Steinkamp: And a lot of accessibility programs are — disable multi-view in the Galaxies. So there is the ability to do multi-screen in Galaxies; but generally, if Talkback or anything's active, that's disabled within Galaxy TouchWiz.

JM: Yeah. There — in our industry, that's kind of the normal condition right now, but we're — we're trying to work with, you know, Apple, Google, etc.

JS: It's polite enough to tell you that it's disabling it, though, so that's really nice.

JM: Yeah. Yeah. When it get on, like — we can Wi-Fi to a PC right now. We cannot Wi-Fi to a Mac. But with an upgrade hopefully sometime this year, we'll also have the Wi-Fi to a Mac. But that would be one reason, for example, that you may not want to use the E-Bot's Wi-Fi connection to your laptop. You might want to use the USB 2.0 — or 2.0 or 3.0 to a PC. The USB 3.0 is our only option to a Mac right now because Mac requires the 3.0. It wants to operate faster. And then you use your computer to go onto the Internet over Wi-Fi. That way, you can have both simultaneous.

Audience Member: Right.

JM: Yep. Good question. Good question. Because yeah, somebody would figure that out within the first five minutes of use. [Laughs]

Audience Member: Yeah.

JM: Okay. Feel free — there's a number of staff — Michelle, myself, Randy, Daniel — we would be more or less the low-vision — and Michael would be five people in our booth that would have expertise with the E-Bot. Feel free to ask any of us; we're more than happy to let you get your hands on the E-Bot. Thank you so much, everyone.

For more exclusive audio coverage, visit BlindBargains.com or download the Blind Bargains app for your iOS or Android device. Blind Bargains audio coverage is presented by the AT Guys, online at ATGuys.com.

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Joe Steinkamp is no stranger to the world of technology, having been a user of video magnification and blindness related electronic devices since 1979. Joe has worked in radio, retail management and Vocational Rehabilitation for blind and low vision individuals in Texas. He has been writing about the A.T. Industry for 15 years and podcasting about it for almost a decade.


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