The vOICe Animation samples [2]

Auditory panorama

Blind people normally have more difficulty than the sighted to know where they are and where they are heading. It can be hard and time-consuming to obtain the kind of broad overview for orientation that the sighted get so quickly and effortlessly. With the long cane used for direct physical contact, one perceives at most one landmark at a time. That is like having an extremely dense fog where you cannot see more than one metre ahead. So when you make a few strides, your previous landmark, even if there was one, is gone, lost, and the next landmark usually isn't there yet. This makes reversing a route rather difficult. By using the cane as an echolocation device through tapping, or by using electronic sonar devices, or even through the sound reflections from one's footsteps, one can effectively extend this range of view, but this will still not capture the unique visual characteristics of, say, a building a few hundred metres away. To the sighted, buildings in particular are the landmarks they rely upon for orientation, and when they move along one, they may briefly stand still, turn around and say to themselves ``Ah, that building I must remember to notice when I later reverse my route and then turn left at the corner to return to where I came from.'' The vOICe turns the unique visual characteristics of a building into equally unique sounds, and on your way back, you listen for that particular sound pattern to know where you are and what your direction is, even if you are not shorelining. If there is a tree with a block of houses in the background, you will hear both landmarks ``simultaneously,'' i.e., in a single soundscape. There will almost always be several landmarks ``in sight'' such that, if one drops out of view, or is simply hard to interpret, there is the continuity of still having several other landmarks, continually giving you a sense of direction and position. The same applies when a new landmark moves into the field of view. Naturally, one can always mute The vOICe to listen to other auditory cues like traffic and ``sound shadows'' that are very valuable in their own right.

After the 16-frame animation starts running, turn off the animation through the <Animate> checkbox, and switch back and forth between soundscapes manually, using the left and right arrow/cursor keys on your keyboard. Listen for the different sound patterns as you turn left or right. If you are sighted, try closing your eyes: can you recognize the large building from its sound as you turn around? There are a number of very characteristic sounds that tell you what direction you are facing, together with some sense of distance through perspective: big changes in repetitive patterns indicate that a building structure is nearby. As far as this would still leave any doubt, making a few strides will show further significant changes only for things that are at relatively close range.

Walking along trees and houses

This example is yet another demonstration of very complicated real-life images. Of course you are not supposed to immediately understand what you are hearing here. However, if you are sighted and turn off the animation through the <Animate> checkbox, and then switch back and forth between soundscapes manually, you will again find that you can hear many of the visual details if you concentrate on the various bits and pieces, and particularly when you draw and remove bright dots or lines at various places to help your brain focus on auditory details. The more time you spend on it, the more you will discern. Now if you compare this to learning the alphabet versus learning to read and write fluently, does it seem totally unreasonable to speculate that the same increase in understanding and fluency can happen here through prolonged training? After all, much of the auditory information does get into your brain, apparently, so the perceptual bottleneck is not in the first place in hearing itself, but in the higher cognitive processing of the soundscapes, for which you were never trained. Remember that it took you years to go from the alphabet to reading Goethe's Faust or the Tibetan Book of the Dead, or the Bible, or the Koran, or whatever jewel of written understanding. And yet, as with the alphabet, the soundscapes quickly give you a basic understanding of simple things, like the position of bright and dark areas: learning can be gradual!

Auditory panorama: Eindhoven marketplace

Another panoramic view that you can explore!