A poet and artist has enlisted the help of scientists and engineering students to create a “seeing machine” that may eventually help people like her, with severely impaired vision, to read, look at pictures and explore landscapes and buildings.

The $4000 system consists of a projector, computer, monitor, eyepiece and a joystick for zooming in and out, and light-emitting diodes, and uses a “visual language” that combines letters and simple pictures to represent hundreds of nouns and verbs.