A group of students at Colorado School of Mines decided to take their capstone project a step further.

A team comprised of a couple recent alumni -- Jack Walters, Marley DeBrido and Benjamin Clay -- along with current student Reeve Nyland and advisor Bryan Duarte are working on something big. 

"It's a good company with a good product we're trying to make and can have some good benefits in the world," Clay said. 

It's called HapWare, and it's a product designed to help the visually impaired community. 

"Within 90 seconds of wearing the device, users were able to know seven nonverbal cues at 95% accuracy," Walters explained. 

But let's back up and explain what all this means. HapWare is a play on the haptic reaction, which is essentially the sensation of touch. While people who are visually impaired don't lose that feeling, they do have harder times reading social cues, typically associated with seeing the physical reaction of who they're interacting with. What HapWare's technology hopes to do on a mass scale is introduce a middle ground through the sensation of touch. 

"Given how the parts of the face are arranged. How your smile is oriented. Are your eyebrows raised? Are your eyes squinting? You can then turn that into an expression," DeBrido said. 

Effectively, the user has a pair of glasses that are able to read and learn the facial expressions of someone the visually impaired person is interacting with. If that person, for instance, smiles, the glasses send a signal to a corresponding wristband. 

The wristband then sends the user a haptic reaction, be it a vibration or sequence, that allows a visually impaired or even neurodivergent person to better read the social cue. Duarte, who is one of less than two dozen individuals in the world who is fully blind and holds a PhD, started as the project advisor and is now the chief technological officer of HapWare. 

"We're trying to give people equal access to the world around them whether that's social access or the world around them," he said. 

Every member of the team referenced the gratifyfing  of seeing pilot users (effectively, test subjects for the equipment) find happiness in excitement in being able to read social cues in  a way they were never able to before. While the company is still in its' infancy, the team feels confident in what they're doing and that they'll be able to introduce it to those that need it sooner rather than later. 

"It will in my opinion change the world," Nyland said.