Blind "see with sound"

(BBC News)

Blind 'see with sound'

By Lakshmi Sandhana

Michelle Thomas is learning to "see", not with her eyes but her ears.

A computer reconstruction of one second of sound as seen by the vOICe system

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".

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.

Watch the 'spikes'

A wearable setup consists of a head-mounted camera, stereo headphones and a notebook PC.

In total it costs about $2,500. The software is available as a free download.

A blind user wearing The vOICe goes in search of her lost rubbish bin

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."