Seeds of possibilities

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The second year M.Tech. students of IIT Bombay, Bhushan N. Kharbikar and Nitin Pawar, together with Ph.D. student Ajay Vijay Suryavanshi, have developed universal eyeglasses using a tunable-focus lens system and an intelligence module which will quantify refractive errors without human intervention. Put simply, the lenses will work for a myopic granddaughter and a presbyopic grandmother at home!

“One only needs to get a set of glasses calibrated as per one’s requirement. The-re’s no hassle of going for different lenses for different vision disorders,” says Kharbikar, the innovator of Drishti eyeglasses.
A winner of the Samsung Innovation Aw-ards 2012, instituted by Samsung India and Found-ation for Innovation and Technology Transfer, the team started on Drishti some four months ago. “We are looking forward to improvising it. Ev-entually, we want the support of the government and NGOs to make it accessible to the poor,” adds Pawar.
From universal eyeglasses to a gesture-based controller that provides spatial coordinates for anything, a robotic manipulator, and a scheme to enable sports fans to watch a match from any desired angle, the 10 youth innovation projects competing for the awards at the IIT Delhi campus have had kept the young engineers busy during their degrees. The projects were often based on a tip from able faculty heads, completed during the summer vacations and late nights, and had the fund and support of IITs’ encouraging assembly lines. “Since the entries come from all across IIT campuses, being part of the club has its own kick,” says Keshav Mohta, a brain behind the prototype that uses algae to control emissions.
The winners include CLA-SAT, an audio-based context and event recognition system for mobile platforms; Zumble.com, an app that uses NLP and sentiment mining to match strangers and enrich avatars; and Drishti. A special acknowledgement went to the IIT Kanpur team of VORWIS for their application that enables intuitive interaction with virtual objects in the real world via gesture recognition.
An entry from IIT Delhi, Tele-operation through Brain Mac-hine Interface (BMI) was for spinal cord injury patients leading a dependent life. “We have demonstrated that control signals could be taken from an injured person’s brain and used to operate a robotic prosthesis, giving him a fresh lease of life,” said Puneet Singhal, a team member.