VizWiz - sounds like a funky app! And you'd be right. It certainly is a funky app! VizWiz is an app for the iPhone that allows blind and partially sighted users to get answers to questions about their surroundings by taking a photo. But we already have apps that do that right? Apps such as oMoby. We do, but VizWiz has something special up its sleeve that sets it apart from other similar apps.
Where to get it
How is VizWiz different?
VizWiz differs from apps such as oMoby in that it uses a combination of techniques (some automatic and some human-powered) to answer the user's question. Like oMoby, you can use automatic image processing but with VizWiz you can also use something called anonymous web workers (we'll explain what these are shortly) or members of your social network to have a human answer your question. This is great for when you're taking an image of something you might think is particularly obscure that automatic image processing may struggle to identify. This combination of options lets VizWiz get fast and accurate answers when answering questions.
What exactly are Web Workers?
Put simply, they are just people on the web their to answer your questions. Workers come from either a pool of VizWiz volunteers or from Amazon's Mechanical Turk marketplace.
If you want to read more, there's an interesting page on the VizWiz website that details all the technology behind what they call the Answer Services.
User comment
We heard from Janet Tuggey, an iPhone 3GS user who's been using VizWiz for a while.
I was very excited when I first heard about this app, particularly the bit about getting answers to questions from web workers and people on my Twitter account. This meant that I could ask a wide varierty of questions, not just the usual "What's this?"
I've used this app quite a few times now. At times I did get a ropey Internet connection, which meant that I couldn't get any answers, this was rather frustrating as I was using the app at home, where I have a Wi-Fi connection so couldn't understand why I wasn't being connected. However, once I got the connection then I only had to wait about 1 minute for the answers to my questions.
I think, to be honest, this app would work better with an iPhone 4, as it has a better camera and a flash, which means you get better quality pictures, so, say for asking questions about colours, the picture would be a more accurate representation of the colour. I know for a fact that I had something blue in my hand but when I tested it out, someone on my Twitter account said it was light brown and it was only when I stood by a window and took a photo that I got the correct answer, the light from the window must have helped to give a true representation of the colour.
However, I have used the app successfully for many things, including finding out how many slices of cold meat I had in a packet, which you probably couldn't find out if you used something such as oMoby. So I'd definitely recommend this app to anyone wanting to find information.
Want to learn more?
Then there's a handy tutorial on the VizWiz website!
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