9 Great Reads From CNET This Week: Smart Glasses for the Blind, Buildings Made of Bacteria

Smart specs scan surroundings and tell wearers what's there. Also: Future Martian homes might be made of microbes, and Pixar ups its game with Lightyear. The week's must-reads.

Edward Moyer Senior Editor

Edward Moyer is a senior editor at CNET and a many-year veteran of the writing and editing world. He enjoys taking sentences apart and putting them back together. He also likes making them from scratch. ¶ For nearly a quarter of a century, he's edited and written stories about various aspects of the technology world, from the US National Security Agency's controversial spying techniques to historic NASA space missions to 3D-printed works of fine art. Before that, he wrote about movies, musicians, artists and subcultures.

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Ed was a member of the CNET crew that won a National Magazine Award from the American Society of Magazine Editors for general excellence online. He's also edited pieces that've nabbed prizes from the Society of Professional Journalists and others.

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Edward Moyer

April 23, 2022 5:00 a.m. PT

2 min read

When Google Glass smart specs first appeared nearly a decade ago, people gawked. But they also balked. Remember the term "Glassholes"? Still, though Glass never made it to retail shelves, an enterprise edition is serving as the basis for some interesting, useful and perhaps even life-altering tech.

Envision's smart glasses use artificial intelligence to help people who are blind or visually impaired better understand their surroundings. The specs can scan objects, people and text, and then relay that information to the wearer by way of a small built-in speaker.

Wearers can even start a video call with friends or family members and have those folks describe the scene the device's camera is showing them. "I called up one of my colleagues ... and said, 'What do you see?' and she described the environment to me," one user told CNET's Abrar Al-Heeti.

That story is among the many in-depth features and thought-provoking commentaries that appeared on CNET this week. So here you go. These are the stories you don't want to miss.