[accessibleimage] Re: Mental synthesis of images

Hello Peter. I have been aware of your VOICe work for a number of years and find it both fascinating and frustrating.I would describe VOICe as a generalization of the AGC tone graphing method, or maybe AGC as a special case of VOICe. I'm sure you also know of the wonderful technology introduced many years ago by Prof. Kay in New Zealand that is in some sense a further generalization of VOICe. The Kay technology is packaged in a head-mounted unit that is available as a commercial product, but my fuzzy brain cannot recall its name. I'm sure some list members will know this fascinating product. It has been used in Japan for children who became so proficient at seeing with sound that they could play softball. No kidding.

The AGC tone plotting technology seems to be extremely intuitive. In our original testing, we found that just a few minutes familiarization was enough for most people to be able to "read" a graph quite accurately with the audio tone plot. There has been at least one other study (by Yu and Brewster in Glasgow) that confirm our findings - in fact extend them to show that audio tone plots are more quantitative than graphs read haptically or even on a tactile copy. Quite surprising really.

Unfortunately both VOICe and the Kay technology are not so intuitive, and it does take a long familiarization time to learn them. So in many ways the reasons they are not more widely used undoubtedly arise from the same human frailties that get in the way of learning braille. Very few people, myself included, have the patience and drive to learn braille as adults. Chris is an admirable exception.

I'm sure you also know about my efforts to bring access to 2d information with the IVEO technology. IVEO is not as quick and easy as VOICe, but it provides quite a bit more information and, most importantly, is something that most blind people can use almost immediately "out of the box". I wish it was as quick and as inexpensive as VOICe.

Thanks for opening this thread Peter. I really think people on this list will enjoy knowing about audio representations of 2d pictures.

John

At 05:38 AM 1/10/2006, blindfold@xxxxxxxxxx wrote: 
Hi Chris,

Thank you for posting these interesting notes about
generating images in your mind. This of course lies
at the heart of The vOICe approach where arbitrary
image information is provided via sound, and it is
left to the brain to try and learn to (re)synthesize
the original visual view.

I wonder, given what you say about John's AGC, how
well can you mentally "see" (visualize) a view such
as in the sound file (direct URL to short wav sample
follows, so set your media player to auto-repeat)

   http://www.seeingwithsound.com/voiscopebw.wav

or the slowed down sample

   http://www.seeingwithsound.com/voiscopebw2.wav

Best regards,

Peter Meijer


Seeing with Sound - The vOICe
http://www.seeingwithsound.com/intro.htm


John A. Gardner
Professor and Director, Science Access Project
Department of Physics
Oregon State University
Corvallis, OR 97331
tel: (541) 737 3278
FAX: (541) 737 1683
        SAP URL: http://dots.physics.orst.edu/


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