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I don't remember the details exactly, but one of the first times I heard of Tom Reiss and his blue glasses was on some tv news/documentary type program, and I believe it may have been NOVA. For some reason that show comes to mind. It was definitely a very interesting segment. He had also at some point, teamed up with some computer types, to develop some glasses, in which a holographic image of moving stairs was superimposed over the real objects also in front of him. This seemed to help him walk more smoothly and helped with freezing (I think). I believe some of his ideas for this concept came from the movie Awakenings. I guess that in one part of the movie, a woman who typically had alot of difficulty walking, actually was able to walk a bit better whenever she was in the nursing home's cafeteria. (now, some of these details I'm recounting may not be exactly as they were originally, but they're close enough to get the picture). It turned out that it was the alternating black and white patterns of the tiles on the floor of that room, which someone seemed to reach a more primitive part of her brain (just as musical rhythms and patterns do also) and allowed her to thus walk a bit better. So, Tom used this story as the basis for his own experimentation with patterns and how that affected his own gait. I think that he had generally an easier time going up and down stair cuz of the repeating pattern there, than he did walking on a straight out path, say down the street or something. So, he tried to find a way to replicate, in his mind, using some visual aid, the benefits of the stair pattern, while he was walking on flat surfaces. His first attempts at testing this phenomena, involved clamping playing cards to his tennis shoes in such a way so that when he walked, they kinda passed over and around each other in a repeating manner. Altho' this set up was crude, it did seem to work, and I think he also tried various other adaptations on the same idea, until eventually teaming with these computer vision researchers. These glasses, with their repeating holographic stair image, were the final result of all this study. The stair image, being holographic, didn't interfere with his view of the "real" objects before him. They showed him walking both with and without them on, and you could see a big difference. I had actually forgotten about all that. Maybe I'll go search the Nova archives and see if I can find the story, if that's where it was. Now that it's been brought up again, does anyone know whatever happenned to the further development and/or use of these glasses? If they really work, then personally, I'd rather make use of them as an aid for my pd, when I reach that point, and delay as long as possible, the need for any brain surgery. I'd rather look like a geeky engineer with my glasses on (as I've sometimes been teased as being when I wear my glasses rather than my contacts. Since I am an engineer, I can only dispute the "geeky" part!). Brain surgery, of any sort, is definitely last on my personal list of options. I'll try alot of things before that. Wendy Tebay