I'm Sunny Zhu, the author of the "Intelligent Eye" app and hardware. I'm a comp-sci enthusiast.

I originally dedicated some time to a volunteering service program called "beYoureyeS", where I coupled and guided with visually impaired runners to participate together in running events weekly. In this activity, I guided blind people by holding a leading rope with them, it acts like a bridge that connects me and the person I'm helping.

Through this program, I realized how different the visually impaired people really are than I expect. They can travel conveniently through the aid of volunteers and the metro guiding service. They also pursue a lot of passions and dreams. It feels like that I'm no longer accompanying "the visually impaired", but a group of aspirational people just like us.

One of the adults that left the most impression on me is a female who have joined this service program for 2 years. She can only see a blurred image of the world, but she always has a smile on her face. She passionately shared her love for running, swimming, and music. She had a lot of interests and dreams, just like me!

However, I'm also more aware of the challenges visually impaired people face in their daily lives. From what they said, I learned that they're fine with a volunteer's help. Without them, they're only able to travel in familiar places, swinging the blind cane left and right to detect obstacles that are at the height of their feet. This means they are unprotected against anything that are up high or moving towards them with a fast speed. When I guided visually impaired people to run, they nearly ran into a low-hanging branch. On the other hand, guiding dogs and technology are way too costly for them. 

I really want to help their lives by giving them some support. Volunteering isn't a long term solution to aid blind people, so I came up with the idea of developing an app and a backpack that could act as the visually impaired user's eye, detecting the scene and measuring the distance between obstacles to navigate them.

Just a few days ago I decided to put on an eye mask and wear the jacket on my body to test it. At first, I was frightened since I can’t see anything, but when it broadcasts information about its surroundings in real time, I surprisingly felt that I can acutally rely on this intelligent hardware. It was really exciting to see how my hypothesis turned to reality.

In the future, I'll continue working on similar projects, using technology to benefit people. I might as well turn the prototype in to a real product and found an NGO, where members develop more high tech products to help solve social problems.