Blind 'See With Sound'
From: BBC News - 10/07/2003
By: Lakshmi Sandhana

A scientist in the Netherlands has developed a revolutionary system that
allows the blind to get a glimpse of what is around via audio, helping users
to trace out buildings, read graphs, and watch television. The vOICe (Oh I
See) system consists of a head-mounted camera, stereo headphones, software,
and a notebook PC, a wearable setup that costs about $2,500; the software can
be downloaded for free. Moreover, a more portable but simplified version of
vOICe has been developed for the Nokia 3650 camera phone. Dr. Peter Meijer of
Philips Research Laboratories says the idea behind the system is to help the
brain equate visual surroundings, considering everything has a unique sound.
For example, the mobile camera phone is designed to translate images into a
highly complex soundscape, then transmit them to the user over the
headphones. Meijer believes vOICe is effective because information "content"
is more important to the brain than the information "carrier" (here sound).
"After all, the signals in the optic nerve of a normally sighted person are
also 'just' neutral spiking patterns," Meijer explains. "What you think you
'see' is what your brain makes of all those firing patterns." Kevin O'Regan
of the National Centre for Scientific Research says that a perfected version
of the software could stimulate vision-like images in the blind, but he says
vision's high-bandwidth needs could make it difficult to achieve. 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/science/nature/3171226.stm