Edited senses

Keywords: Sensory Substitution (Addition) / Visual Impairment / Human Echolocation

Role: Personal Project (2020)

Overview：

All these sensors that we know and love, like our eyes, our ears and our fingertips, these are merely peripheral plug- and-play devices. You stick them in, and you’re good to go. The brain figures out what to do with the data that comes in. The brain doesn’t know and it doesn’t care where it gets the data from. Whatever information comes in, it just figures out what to do with it. And it is a very efficient kind of machine. It’s essentially a general purpose computing devices and it just takes in everything and figures out what it’s going to do with it.

So when you look across the animal kingdom, you find lots of peripheral devices. Animals like snakes and birds use all these kinds of different sensors sensing the world based on the same operation principles of the brain.This allow us to edit our sensing capabilities as human by creating new artificial peripheral devices and feed informations to our brain via brand new channel.

- Prof David Eagleman / Stanford Neuroscientist

‘Edited Senses’ is a project exploring the sensory substitution and remolding peripheral devices for our brain. Based on the principle of echolocation, I am trying to help people with visual impairment build new vision through the hearing channel.

Please wear earphone for binaural effect:

Human echolocation

Sam Oldridge is a boy with visual impairment and he is training himself how to echolocate. He can use echos from tongue and finger click to recognize objects. (as well as use feet or cane hit ground). The video on the left record the whole process.

Research shows that everyone including people with normal visual and people with visual impairment all get the capability to master the echolocation skill by more than 6 months training.

But the difficulity within that is the differences between the orginal sound and the echos are too subtle to be clearly heard.

Research Support

Brief:

Creating a device to minimize the difficulty of mastering human echolocation and build a ‘vision’ in the brain based on the sense of hearing. Helping people with visual impairment build a vision that can recognize objects in different size, direction and distance based on sound.

How:
In the process of human echolocation, replacing the tongue click with the Ultrasonic speaker and then modify and transform echos to normal sound with a earpiece.