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Yvonne Felix998 Archiveswatching me. This would not be remarkable for most people I meet with, but Felix is legally blind.

She smiles and tells me she can see me taking notes on my computer and every time I look up at her. I can’t see her eyes, but the special visor she’s wearing from eSight is pointed in my direction.

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Felix, who lives with Stargardt disease, a juvenile form of macular degeneration, was declared legally blind when she was 13. For Felix, who came to my office to demonstrate eSight 3 smart glasses, this means she has a large, totally blind spot in the middle of her vision, no depth perception, an inability to discern colors and only blurry peripheral vision.

Legal blindness is a subset of vision impairment. Doctors define legal blindness as central visual acuity of 20/200 or less with the best possible correction, and/or a visual field of 20 degrees or less. Normal vision is 20/20. Felix has 20/400 vision.

CARD ID: 306920

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

For much of her life, Felix lived as a profoundly blind person, using a walking stick, reading braille and not being able to see her children when they were born or as they grew.

All that changed five years ago, when Felix became beta-tester number one for eSight.

The eSight 3 camera, which Felix is wearing on this day looks like a smaller, more elegant version of the increasingly popular virtual and augmented reality headsets. It fits over her eyes and corrective glasses. The front is equipped with a single HD camera and two sensors.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Inside are two OLED screens and powerful prisms. There’s also a processor in the headset and it’s all connected to a small controller/battery pack (it gets 3-to-4 hours of battery life). Images collected by the camera and data from the sensors, which help keep the image in focus, is all processed in the visor and then displayed on tiny dual screens just millimeters from Felix’s eyes. The remote also lets Felix zoom in up to 24x on images.

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“Yvonne has some vestigial retinal function. We stimulate what remains to send more information to the brain through the eye,” said eSight Director of Marketing Jeff Fenton who joined Felix for the visit.

With eSight 3, said Fenton, Felix effectively has 20/25 vision.

There are 300 million legally blind people in the world, 3 million of which live in North America. They are all potentially candidates to use this device (which costs $9,995).

Aside from adjusting the pupillary distance (the distance between your two eyes), eSight 3 glasses are pretty much plug-and-play. Users can make image adjustments that suit their visual needs via the attached controller.

Felix is wearing the new third-generation headset. Announced Wednesday, it is, according to Fenton, radically lighter (under 4 ounces), smaller and significantly more powerful than the previous edition.

Having worn every version of the headset and now working for eSight as its Community Development lead, Felix appears to agree. The device sits on the bridge of her nose and is held on her head with a few small straps that she says help counter the weight of eSight 3 on her face.

Felix removes the headset from her face and hands it to me to let me see what she sees. Inside the visor, I see a still-image she screen captured: it’s a high-contrast, high-color image of me.

The contrast is part of what makes it possible for Felix to see the images. It’s also critical for reading text. The device even includes a flashlight to help light up a scene.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Fenton explained that eSight is better than other image solutions because it’s a single device, as opposed to one for reading, one for computing and one for taking a walk.

Wearing eSight has been, for Felix, a life-altering experience. She no longer uses a walking stick, for instance (I watched her navigate our office with ease -- she accepted assistance when she wasn't wearing the headset). And now she can read books, although, a braille-reader for most of her life, Felix didn’t know how to read print. “I had to learn to read English, which is a very interesting language,” she laughed.

Putting on the device also had a more personal impact. “It was the first time I saw my husband and son who was two months old and my 6-year-old son.”

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