New Tech allows Blind to "See with sound"
From the Department of Not-So-SciFi/Superhero-Now-Eh?
BBC reports: Dutch camera/software allow Blind to "See with Sound"
iTunes visualization plugin?
I don't expect that image quality represents "typical" results...
if so, then they've come a long way for an initial release from much of the earlier experimentation i've seen documented with implanted CCDs.
I'm extremely pleased to read that what I remember as purely the province of decades of speculative fiction and termed "audiovision", pseudo-sonar, or daredevil-sense, has seemingly broken the barrier into computing reality.
This may represent substantial progress for neurological research as much as it may assist the blind or the investors in vOICe. Spin offs in slimming the info bandwidth to a "retrained brain" may also come in areas such as robotic machine vision, bootstrapping the 'bionic eyes' side of the equation around some prior challenges and bottlenecks.
mindbendingly cool.
BBC reports: Dutch camera/software allow Blind to "See with Sound"
Quote:
Michelle Thomas is learning to "see", not with her eyes but her ears.
Now she can also use a mobile camera phone to do it.
Blind since birth, Ms Thomas is able to recognize the walls and doors of her house, discern whether the lights are on or off and even distinguish a CD from a floppy disk after only a week using a revolutionary new system.
She is "seeing with sound".
A computer reconstruction of one second of sound as seen by the vOICe system
Developed by Dr Peter Meijer, a senior scientist at Philips Research Laboratories in the Netherlands, the system is called The vOICe (the three middle letters standing for "Oh I See").
It works by translating images from a camera on-the-fly into highly complex soundscapes, which are then transmitted to the user over headphones.
A wearable setup consists of a head-mounted camera, stereo headphones and a notebook PC (not shown).
In total it costs about $2,500. The software is available as a free download.
Meijer is bargaining on the brain's adaptive capacity.
He hopes that blind users will ultimately learn to mentally reconstruct the visual content of the live camera views, as carried by the soundscapes, so that they experience something akin to meaningful vision.
"Our assumption here is that the brain is ultimately not interested in the information 'carrier' (here sound) but only in the information 'content'," says Meijer.
"After all, the signals in the optic nerve of a normally sighted person are also 'just' neural spiking patterns. What you think you 'see' is what your brain makes of all those firing patterns."
Enabling users to get an audio snapshot of what is visually in front of them, The vOICe is taking a very different route from "bionic eyes" - retinal and brain implants.
It is non-invasive, offering a higher image resolution (up to several thousand pixels) and does not necessarily rely on the visual cortex.
"Everything has its own unique sound and once you learn the principles involved you can know what you're seeing," says Thomas.
Right now brighter areas sound louder, height is indicated by pitch and a built-in colour identifier speaks out colour names when activated.
While it can't track fast cars or read small print efficiently, it does allow blind users to trace out buildings, read a graph and even watch television.
Comparing it in terms of difficulty to learning a foreign language, Meijer hopes that in the long run, users will become more "fluent" in the mental translation so that it becomes more like natural perception, without conscious effort.
... article continues ...
Michelle Thomas is learning to "see", not with her eyes but her ears.
Now she can also use a mobile camera phone to do it.
Blind since birth, Ms Thomas is able to recognize the walls and doors of her house, discern whether the lights are on or off and even distinguish a CD from a floppy disk after only a week using a revolutionary new system.
She is "seeing with sound".
A computer reconstruction of one second of sound as seen by the vOICe systemDeveloped by Dr Peter Meijer, a senior scientist at Philips Research Laboratories in the Netherlands, the system is called The vOICe (the three middle letters standing for "Oh I See").
It works by translating images from a camera on-the-fly into highly complex soundscapes, which are then transmitted to the user over headphones.
A wearable setup consists of a head-mounted camera, stereo headphones and a notebook PC (not shown).
In total it costs about $2,500. The software is available as a free download.
Meijer is bargaining on the brain's adaptive capacity.
He hopes that blind users will ultimately learn to mentally reconstruct the visual content of the live camera views, as carried by the soundscapes, so that they experience something akin to meaningful vision.
"Our assumption here is that the brain is ultimately not interested in the information 'carrier' (here sound) but only in the information 'content'," says Meijer.
"After all, the signals in the optic nerve of a normally sighted person are also 'just' neural spiking patterns. What you think you 'see' is what your brain makes of all those firing patterns."
Enabling users to get an audio snapshot of what is visually in front of them, The vOICe is taking a very different route from "bionic eyes" - retinal and brain implants.
It is non-invasive, offering a higher image resolution (up to several thousand pixels) and does not necessarily rely on the visual cortex.
"Everything has its own unique sound and once you learn the principles involved you can know what you're seeing," says Thomas.
Right now brighter areas sound louder, height is indicated by pitch and a built-in colour identifier speaks out colour names when activated.
While it can't track fast cars or read small print efficiently, it does allow blind users to trace out buildings, read a graph and even watch television.
Comparing it in terms of difficulty to learning a foreign language, Meijer hopes that in the long run, users will become more "fluent" in the mental translation so that it becomes more like natural perception, without conscious effort.
... article continues ...
iTunes visualization plugin?
I don't expect that image quality represents "typical" results...
if so, then they've come a long way for an initial release from much of the earlier experimentation i've seen documented with implanted CCDs.
I'm extremely pleased to read that what I remember as purely the province of decades of speculative fiction and termed "audiovision", pseudo-sonar, or daredevil-sense, has seemingly broken the barrier into computing reality.
This may represent substantial progress for neurological research as much as it may assist the blind or the investors in vOICe. Spin offs in slimming the info bandwidth to a "retrained brain" may also come in areas such as robotic machine vision, bootstrapping the 'bionic eyes' side of the equation around some prior challenges and bottlenecks.
mindbendingly cool.