Innovative Concept: Sony Developing Subtitle Glasses for Moviegoers
By Rob Scott
August 26, 2011
August 26, 2011
- Sony is developing special subtitle-enabled glasses that could be in UK movie theaters as early as next year.
- According to the BBC, one in six people have some level of deafness and are not being served well by the movie industry. In fact, many film fans with hearing issues wait for films to be released on DVD when subtitles are available.
- “What we do is put the closed captions or the subtitles onto the screen of the glasses so it’s super-imposed on the cinema screen, [making it look] like the actual subtitles are on the cinema screen,” explains Tim Potter of Sony.
- “The good thing about them is that you’re not refocusing. It doesn’t feel like the words are really near and the screen is far away. It feels like they’re together,” said test subject Charlie Swinbourne, who is hard of hearing.
- “It was a great experience,” he added. “I think it’s a massive opportunity to improve deaf people’s lives and I think there’s great hope that this would give us a cinema-going future.”
- If the glasses prove popular in the UK, we should expect to see them in wider availability in the near future.