seeing

I wrote about Peter Meijer’s The vOICe yesterday, and last night, between waking and sleeping it occurred to me that I would be able to use my cellphone as a viewfinder, or a scope. I can try to explain how vOICe (”Oh, I See!) works, but Meijer’s explanation is much better:

The vOICe vision technology for the totally blind offers the experience of live camera views through sophisticated image-to-sound renderings. In theory this use of digital senses could lead to synthetic vision with truly visual sensations (”qualia”) through crossmodal sensory integration, by exploiting the existing multisensory processing and neural plasticity of the human brain through training and education. The vOICe implements a form of sensory substitution where the goal is to bind visual input to visual qualia with a minimum of training time and effort, and improve quality of life (QoL) for blind users. The vOICe also acts as a research vehicle for the cognitive sciences to learn more about the dynamics of large-scale adaptive processes, including attention and expectation guided bottom-up and top-down learning processes, and involving cross-modal neuromodulation in the human brain. Neuroscience research has already shown that the visual cortex of even adult blind people can become responsive to sound, and sound-induced illusory flashes can be evoked in most sighted people.

The site offers a cellphone application for download that works on many Nokia phones: point here with your phone’s browser to install over the air. It does work on my Nokia N82, which also has the NFB reader installed, and mobile talk. There were some conflicts regarding the speech synthesizer and phone settings, but it works brilliantly. And so I walked around my neighbourhood for a bit this afternoon, and it was wonderful. What I’ve been missing is the sense of movement, of moving against a backdrop in space. Now, I was able to hear trees, and parked cars, and lamp posts and garbage cans. Amazing. I can see how training is required, but together with sensory perception I already have, vOICe provides a very good spatial image of my surroundings. I’ve used clickers, but this is much better. I wrote here yesterday, that I supposed that vOIce would be a good viewfinder for taking photographs. That’s something I need to test, but I can imagine that it would work, even to the extent of being able to review images on the LCD. For those who want to see, and hear what I’m on about: here’s a video.