3 hours ago - Sports

Blind veterans use AI glasses to run the Army Ten-Miler

Mimi Montgomery

Two runners in the foreground, a man in blue and a woman in neon, run with a leashed dog on a gravel path. In the distance, the U.S. Capitol dome and another building appear behind trees. — Photo: Courtesy of Simon Bruty on behalf of Lighthouse Guild

A team of blind and visually impaired military veterans completed Sunday's rainy Army Ten-Miler with some high-tech help: AI glasses.

Why it matters: The technology can describe aloud what's happening around the wearer, giving runners with vision loss a new way to experience their surroundings.

"It's all that richness of the environment around you that the AI is able to describe," says Thomas Panek, who ran the race alongside blind veterans Roosevelt Morring, Rob Sanchas and Shawntina Gibson.

State of play: Panek leads Lighthouse Guild, a nonprofit partnering with Meta to provide free AI glasses to blind veterans nationwide.

How it works: The glasses can describe what's ahead — say, that there's an upcoming water stop, or that the runner is about to cross a bridge, and here's the backstory of that bridge.

The glasses still aren't perfect, so the athletes ran alongside safety runners, but Panek tells Axios Lighthouse is working with Meta to improve the glasses for visually impaired wearers.

What they're saying: "It helps give you contextual awareness, which is the most important thing that people without vision lose," says Panek, who is blind and ran the NYC Half with the glasses earlier this year.

The bottom line: The effect is emotional, says Panek. "I've never been able to see a finish line," he says of the many races he's run.

But now the entire moment is described to him in real time. "That's pretty special."

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Blind veterans use AI glasses to run the Army Ten-Miler

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