[blindza] Re: Fw: Ultrasonic helmet lets anyone 'see' like a bat - Harnessing the power of aural navigation
- From: William Brandes <williambrandes@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: blindza@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2015 08:21:01 -0500
um. interesting. but, yes, wouldn't want to rely on and walk off a
cliff. nor will you find me wearing a helmet or being a mickey mouse
look-alike /smile. needs work. lot's of it ... william
On 2/11/15, Jacob Kruger <jacob@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Nice idea - headband version anyway. Just wonder if it will be limited to
> picking up return signals from a specific distance/range, and how
> directional it will be, or not.
>
> See below.
>
> Stay well
>
> Jacob Kruger
> Blind Biker
> Skype: BlindZA
> "Roger Wilco wants to welcome you...to the space janitor's closet..."
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> Hi All,
>
> For your information. Appended is yesterday's Popular Science article.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Peter Meijer
>
>
> Seeing with Sound - The vOICe
> http://www.seeingwithsound.com/winvoice.htm
>
>
> Ultrasonic helmet lets anyone 'see' like a bat.
>
> Harnessing the power of aural navigation.
>
> By Nsikan Akpan.
>
> “He clicks with his tongue as a way of understanding where he is in space.
> This
> is basically what bats do.” That’s how the science podcast Invisibilia
> recently
> described Daniel Kish, a blind man who taught himself how to navigate by
> echolocation. But their description slightly misses the mark. While both
> humans
> and bats can paint visual landscapes from echoes, the pointy-eared flyers
> possess a stark advantage: ultrasonic sound.
>
> Those higher frequencies, which offer a much crisper picture of the world,
> underlie the Sonic Eye, a helmet that replicates bat echolocation.
>
> “We were wondering whether humans needed special neural wiring to
> echolocate, or
> whether a human brain could do it with the same audio info that's available
>
> to a
> bat with ears designed for ultrasonic sounds,” says Stanford theoretical
> neuroscientist and co-creator Jascha Sohl-Dickstein.
>
> Invented as a side project by Sohl-Dickstein and his former colleagues at
> the
> University of California, Berkeley, the device features a speaker at its
> crown,
> which emits ultrasonic chirps like a bat. When the echoes rebound off
> objects,
> the sound waves travel into two bat-shaped ears - called pinna - that rest
> on
> either side of the helmet and help gauge the direction of the echo. Molded
> from
> clay, each pinna has an ultrasonic microphone embedded at the center. A
> computer
> program records the echoes and instantly slows them by a factor of 20.
>
> Dropping the pace and the pitch makes the imperceptible ultrasonic echoes
> audible to the human ear. Sonic Eye wearers can then use the echo delay to
> judge
> distance or mentally track their surroundings (see video below). In a study
> published last month, the team shows that blindfolded wearers of the Sonic
> Eye
> can judge whether a dinner plate, was moved left/right or up/down by ~20
> centimeters - just over the length of a dollar bill.
>
> Along with possibly assisting the blind, the new device presents a good
> case
> that the human mind is innately capable of comprehending high-definition
> soundscapes, like bats do. Other assistive devices have tried to harvest
> ultrasonic echoes, but they typically reprocess the sounds, discarding
> large
> amounts of spatial information.
>
> “That’s the novelty here. A person uses The Sonic Eye to make sound
> judgments
> about the environment, but it doesn't do anything to the [audio] signal
> apart
> from downsampling it,” says Lore Thaler, a psychologist at Durham University
>
> in
> the United Kingdom, who wasn’t involved in creating the device.
>
> Thaler specializes in human echolocation, and her research has shown that
> sound
> perception for expert echolocators resides mentally somewhere between vision
>
> and
> hearing. When blind echolocators like Kish sit in an fMRI, click their
> tongues
> and hear echoes, their vision centers light up with brain activity, much
> like
> when a sighted person sees something.
>
> But here’s a cool twist. When both the blind and sighted try echolocation,
> another brain area connected with understanding visual motion switches on.
>
> “It seems the brain processes echolocation somewhat separately from
> information
> for other types of sounds,” says Thaler. “Echolocation is not just hearing
> like
> everything else, but a special form of spatial audition that the brain
> possibly
> keeps set apart from other aspects of hearing.”
>
> For now, blind echolocators are far better at the skill than sighted
> individuals
> trained in the art, because many, like Kish, developed the talent as a
> child. It
> took months or years to perfect. The question is whether the same would
> apply
> with the Sonic Eye.
>
> “In theory, you could get a finer resolution with an ultrasonic signal
> versus
> what an echolocator would make with their tongue,” says sensory
> neuroscientist
> and co-developer Santani Teng who now works at MIT. An ultrasonic bat chirp,
>
> due
> to shorter wavelength, bounces more sound waves off an object than any echo
>
> made
> by a human voice. An ultrasonic echo has more pieces bouncing back, which
> offer
> more spatial information for the brain to parcel. Bats can perceive
> differences
> as small as 6 mm – or the thickness of three nickels stacked on top of each
>
> other.
>
> A better audio-spatial picture, using ultrasound, might expedite the
> echolocation learning process for humans. Plus most human echolocators with
> blindness still use a walking cane, says Thaler, because they have trouble
> with
> judging elevation and detecting obstacles near the floor. She says that it
> would
> be interesting to see if future users had an easier time of tracking things
>
> on
> the ground.
>
> “You don’t want to block out sensory cues that people need to navigate,”
> says
> Teng. For instance, bats can modify their ultrasonic pulse based on the size
>
> of
> the prey that they’re hunting. A blind user should be able to change the
> ultrasonic output as much they want, says Teng.
>
> But before moving into studies with the blind, the team wants to
> miniaturize
> their current prototype into a headband, says co-developer Benjamin Gaub, a
> Berkeley PhD student in neuroscience who is developing the Sonic Eye into a
> product suitable for the visually impaired. Currently, the Sonic Eye
> requires
> a laptop in a backpack that holds the device’s software, but with a little
> tweaking, the simple program could be run on a microchip or a smart phone.
> The
> team will also consult with the blind community in the Bay Area to
> customize
> additional features.
>
> Source URL:
> http://www.popsci.com/ultrasonic-helmet-lets-anyone-see-bat
>
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