
See with Ears: Auditory Display for Synthetic Vision (2018) - vackosar
https://www.seeingwithsound.com/manual/The_vOICe_Training_Manual.htm
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yodon
Back in about 2000 I remember exchanging emails with a guy who had built a
modified renderer for (I think) the Half-Life 1 engine. He was using audio
rendering to enable blind players to play first person shooters. My
recollection is he was using a series of horizontal scan lines across the
display region with different octaves or similar indicating which scan line
was being "rendered" and different tones indicating the brightness value along
the sweep of each scan line. I think he was primarily using mono audio at the
time, but it's been long enough that I can't entirely recall.

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jolmg
Sounds extremely interesting.

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seeingwithsound
For serious users, The Android version of The vOICe also runs on smart glasses
from Vuzix (Vuzix Blade, M300) [https://www.vuzix.com/appstore/app/the-voice-
for-android](https://www.vuzix.com/appstore/app/the-voice-for-android), EPSON
(Moverio BT-300)
[https://moverio.epson.com/jsp/pc/pc_application_detail.jsp?p...](https://moverio.epson.com/jsp/pc/pc_application_detail.jsp?pack=vOICe.vOICe)
as well as on sub-$200 VISION-800 smart glasses
[https://www.seeingwithsound.com/android-
glasses.htm](https://www.seeingwithsound.com/android-glasses.htm)

Also try the experimental visual object recognition under Options | Say object
names.

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trafnar
You can actually try this out in your browser with your webcam here:
[https://www.seeingwithsound.com/webvoice/webvoice.htm](https://www.seeingwithsound.com/webvoice/webvoice.htm)

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syllable_studio
Cool, that's an interesting scheme for translating vision to audio.

I have experimented a little with using 3D binaural audio for navigating
environments and translating objects' location in 3D space into audio. Here's
my blog post about my experiment [https://blog.syllablehq.com/project-
sonorous-a-proposed-navi...](https://blog.syllablehq.com/project-sonorous-a-
proposed-navigation-tool-for-the-visually-impaired/)

The blog post links to an app you can demo where you can practice navigating a
maze with your eyes closed using only binaural audio to guide you. Anyone can
do it with very little practice!

I would love to spend more time on this in the future and I'd love to consider
adopting this vOICe scheme.

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blipblap
Can you do phase offsets between the ears to get depth perception?

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hammock
This feels really groundbreaking to me. It's like echolocation. Although it
also seems to be projecting 3d onto 2d, while true echolocation gives you a 3d
picture(?)

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perilunar
There's stories of blind people using echolocation to get around, so why not
do a synthetic version of that instead of this made up encoding scheme (as
cool as it is).

I.e. model how sound would propagate in an environment and create the sound an
echolocator would actually hear reflected back.

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hammock
What I was getting at is that would be much more complex, because this uses a
camera (2d), while echolocation/our ears is 3d when all is said and done. So
to do what you're suggesting, you'd first need some way create a 3d model of
the world from the camera's 2d image, and then encode into sound.

At which point, echolocation is probably better.

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jrootabega
Has some overlap with the wave scanner from Elite Dangerous.

[http://wavescanner.net/](http://wavescanner.net/)

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wben
It would be lovely to have a smart phone app that does this in real time. Does
it already exist?

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kej
It's mentioned early in the article, but easy to miss if you jump straight to
the technical details:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=vOICe.vOICe](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=vOICe.vOICe)

