Electronic Glasses Allow Legally Blind Boy to See Mother for First Time

A 12-year old boy who has been legally blind since birth recently saw his mother’s face for the first time thanks to a high tech headset.

The eSight are electronic glasses that utilize a high-speed camera to feed live video to computer, which enhances the video and displays it on powerful LED screens directly in front of the wearer’s eyes in real time. eSight allows wearers to “instantly switch from near vision (reading a document) – to midrange vision (looking up to see who just stepped into the room) – to long range vision (looking out the window to see if it is raining)” and can even magnify images up to 14 times their normal size.

“These full color video images can be clearly seen by the eSight user with unprecedented visual clarity – in essence breaking through most underlying eye conditions that cause their blindness,” eSight’s website claims.

Christopher Ward, Jr. was born with optic nerve hypoplasia, leaving him with only “little light perception in his left eye and very, very low vision in his right eye,” according to his mother, Marquita Hackley. “Something has to be up in his face, almost touching for him to see it.”

Ward recently was able to test out the eSight, allowing him to clearly see his mother for the first time.

“The very first thing he did was turn to me and say, ‘Oh, Mommy! There you are!'” his mother told ABC News. “Just the fact he could even see me meant the whole world to me.”

Hackley is trying to raise the money to purchase an eSight for Ward, which cost $15,000.