[Nfbf-l] Seeing with Sound - The vOICe an Appended recent article in the Huffington Post

[Alan Dicey]

Dear Friends,
For your information. Appended is a recent article in the Huffington Post.
With Best Regards,

God Bless

Alan

Miami, Florida


Seeing with Sound - The vOICe
http://www.seeingwithsound.com/winvoice.htm
Seeing sound and touching data: how new senses will expand your world.
By Ben Thomas.
When Erik Weihenmayer conquered the Seven Summits - the tallest peak on each 
of the seven continents - his friends were impressed, but not exactly 
surprised. After all, Erik had scaled Mt. Everest a few years earlier, and 
he liked to spend his vacations skydiving, skiing and whitewater rafting. 
Those who didn't know much about him, though, were shocked to learn that 
Erik has been blind since age 13.

Though not everyone with damaged eyesight aims to become a world-class 
adventurer, new technologies are transforming the ways that people with 
visual impairment - or even total blindness - are interacting with the 
world. Sonic glasses use echolocation to translate sound waves into 
electrical signals; and vibrotactile displays can map those signals onto a 
grid of stimulation points across the touch-sensitive surface of the tongue. 
The newly approved Argus II device, meanwhile, stimulates simple patterns 
directly onto the optic nerve.
A grid of electrical signals might seem like a poor substitute for the 
richness of sight - systems like these lack the resolution to render 
subtleties of color and shading. But as it turns out, advanced technology 
may not even be necessary for a brain to reconstruct visual imagery from 
other sensory cues; some blind patients report that, after practice, they're 
able to literally see the scenes they're "feeling." This isn't 
pseudoscience - fMRI scans have confirmed that when some blind people touch 
Braille or use echolocation, visual areas of their brain behave as if they 
were actually seeing an image.

Some scientists and hackers are working to blur sensory boundaries even 
further. Since the early 2000s, body-modification artists have been 
implanting electromagnets under their skin - a sense that offers a sort of 
"buzzing sensation" in the presence of electrically charged objects. And 
this February, a team of Duke University researchers announced the creation 
of a brain implant that enables rats to "feel" infrared light through 
touch-sensitive neural pathways.

Like these scientists, I have a strong suspicion that new technological 
senses await us in the near future. To explain why, let me try an analogy 
from a form of technology that's already familiar to us: Phones.
Telephones began as a simple idea: What if we could transmit human voices 
over wires, just as telegraph lines carried simple electrical pulses? And 
for the first century or so of the telephone's existence, that sole function 
was largely its reason for existing - people kept telephones wired up in 
their homes and offices so they could have real-time audio conversations 
without the inconvenience of physical travel.

By the early 1990s, though, expectations had shifted. Mobile phones were 
getting cheaper every year, untethering phone connections from physical 
wires. Thanks to aggressive marketing by Xerox, fax machines had 
proliferated throughout the '70s and '80s, cementing the idea that phone 
lines could send and receive visual images. Although the concepts of fax 
machines and mobile phones had existed since the turn of the twentieth 
century, we came to rely on them more and more in our daily lives as they 
became easier and more reliable to use. Over time, we've begun to regard 
these tools as extensions of our own senses.



It's not hard to see how this trend has accelerated as phones continue to 
get lighter and more powerful, scanning and emailing take the place of 
sending faxes, and audio conversations are ousted by video chats. Touch 
screens, which seemed thrillingly futuristic just five years ago, now come 
standard on most smartphones and tablets - a success story that's grown 
touch screen development into a multi-billion-dollar industry.

Take, for instance, a high-end touch screen manufacturer like Sollensys. 
Over the past several years, they've helped develop flexible touch-sensitive 
screens, as well as multi-layer screens that respond to multiple 
simultaneous tactile inputs. If these developments continue, touch screen 
companies like Sollensys may soon be printing touch-sensitive menus onto LCD 
projection screens and walls - and providing flexible electronic "paper" 
with instant wireless access to the latest news reports.

The next logical step is to mount hands-free wireless devices onto our 
bodies - which is exactly what Google Glass aims to do in the very near 
future. And so the phone - which began as a system for hardwired audio 
communication - has evolved into almost-unrecognizable forms: Wearable, 
wafer-thin, touch-sensitive pads that link us with a worldwide network of 
sights and sounds. Useful technology has a way of merging with its users.

Unlikely as it is that most of us will go under the knife for the sake of 
feeling magnetism or infrared light - or, more to the point, hand over some 
of our perfectly healthy neurons to questionable new senses - techniques 
like echolocation, and technologies like vibrotactile tongue maps, seem to 
hint that such an all-or-nothing approach might not be necessary. If a blind 
person's brain can be trained to see Braille letters - or to create vivid 
mental pictures from a grid of electrical stimulation - could tomorrow's 
non-invasive implants help us physically feel the movements of financial 
markets; of weather systems; of traffic patterns? What new insights might we 
gain from such intuitive perceptions? What would such expanded senses feel 
like?

As our relationships with our phones demonstrate, technology tends to expand 
the range of data we consider integral to our daily lives - and that trend 
holds hint about our near future. Though I'm not blind or deaf, I'm still 
physically unable to perceive most of what's happening around me. I can't 
see protein molecules or ultraviolet radiation; I can't count a nanosecond 
or hear a 50,000-Hz sound. Like all human brains, mine evolved, as Richard 
Dawkins said, "to cope with medium-sized objects moving at medium speeds 
through medium distances in Africa."
But it also evolved to invent - to build tools that expand its reach 
light-years beyond that African savannah. Though we might not all want to 
scale Mount Everest, we share Erik Weihenmayer's unwillingness to let our 
limited senses limit our adventures. When I think back to the landlines and 
card catalogues of the 1950s, I'm amazed that people managed to work and 
think so efficiently under those constraints. What, then, will our 
grandchildren think of our touch screens and wireless networks - and with 
what senses will they look back?

Source URL:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ben-thomas/seeing-sound-and-touching_b_2742970.html

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