Can blind people see with their ears..??

Can blind people see with their ears..??

Audio Translation of Three-dimensional Surroundings for Blind People to 'See' With Their Ears

The blind are much more sensitive to the nuance of sound than the rest of us, Not because their ears are different but because they pay more attention to listening and interpreting what they hear than most of people do.

This increased sensitivity has always helped to blind in locating sound producing objects.

Can we translate a blind person's three-dimensional surroundings into audible information? The objective of the project was to take advantage of the heightened frequency and spatial response of blind people's hearing so that they could 'see' with their ears. The actual device they developed translated the distance to the nearest surrounding objects into audible information.

Using an ultrasonic rangefinder they developed a device that measured the distance to the closest object in a given direction and translated that distance into a varying pitch, a higher pitch for closer objects and a lower pitch for objects that were farther away. Thus, based on the frequency of the tone a person could tell the relative distance to an object.

The next step was to rotate the direction of the range finder, like a radar, to continuously sweep around the person taking measurements in every direction. They then designed headphones that could simulate the tone to be coming from the direction of the measurement. They was able to demonstrate that the prototype device could locate objects such as poles and trees outdoors, but the beam of the range finder was relatively wide (about 25°) and did not have the radial resolution to convey the geometry of complicated surroundings such as a room.

Below is A computer reconstruction of what sound looks like..