posted on Oct, 9 2003 @ 06:23 PM
Very good idea! I hope that it is put into widespread use...
Michelle Thomas is learning to "see", not with her eyes but her ears.
Now she can also use a mobile camera phone to do it.
Blind since birth, Ms Thomas is able to recognize the walls and doors of her house, discern whether the lights are on or off and even distinguish a CD
from a floppy disk after only a week using a revolutionary new system.
She is "seeing with sound".
Developed by Dr Peter Meijer, a senior scientist at Philips Research Laboratories in the Netherlands, the system is called The vOICe (the three middle
letters standing for "Oh I See").
It works by translating images from a camera on-the-fly into highly complex soundscapes, which are then transmitted to the user over headphones.
news.bbc.co.uk...