Pro football all-time leading rusher Emmitt Smith has been leveraging his fame to connect people with telecommunications giant AT&T. His latest endeavor involves a relatively new AT&T-backed startup called Aira.
Aira, founded in 2014, is the creator of smart eyewear for blind and visually impaired people. Aira makes glasses with a sensory button on the side that calls a live agent to assist with directions and overall mobility. That’s where Smith gets involved.
The former Cowboys superstar is working with AT&T’s Experience More campaign, centered around Aira, to bring a vision-impaired fan who has shared his or her story of experiencing more in life to a Dallas Cowboys-Los Angeles Rams game on Oct. 1 in Arlington, Texas. There, Smith will use the Aira’s agent dashboard to give the winner a personalized play-by-play call of the game.
“I’m going to sit up in the box, and we’re going to talk about what I’m seeing, and I’m going to relay the game to them so they can get this visual effect of what’s actually transpiring on the football field,” Smith said on the Rich Eisen Show, which airs on the AT&T Audience Network. “These glasses are pretty awesome. I’m enjoying the technology. This is a way to communicate to the visually impaired to help them understand what’s going on around them.”
Aira uses remote human agents to assist its users through daily activities. The agent is aided by artificial intelligence that can visualize what the a person wearing the glasses sees in real-time. AT&T is providing Aira with wireless support between a user of the glasses and the live agent on the other end.
AT&T is also supporting the technology with its Dynamic Traffic Management, which helps Aira agents prioritize incoming and outgoing data to facilitate a more predictive traffic flow, especially when many people are using Aira at once.
“It’s exciting to have the AT&T ecosystem by our side to help our blind and visually impaired users stay connected,” Aira CEO Suman Kanuganti said in a statement.
According to the press release, Aira is also the first product to launch from AT&T’s Foundry — an innovation incubator – in the Connected Health division.
“Companies entering AT&T’s Foundry are looking to solve a problem through connectivity,” Chris Penrose, the President of Internet of Things Solutions at AT&T, said in a statement. “Our provision of wireless connectivity to Aira will bring nearly real-time access and management to their platform. Ultimately, we believe that this should improve the experience for the blind and visually impaired.”
Aira, which won the Consumer Technology Association Foundation’s Eureka Award, will present along with AT&T at January’s Consumer Electronics Show, the press release said.
A few months before that, though, one lucky person will enjoy a Cowboys game with a bona fide NFL legend helping him or her visualize the game using Aira’s technology.