Saturday, October 27, 2012

SEEING THREW SOUND

Human echolocation is an ability of humans to detect objects in their environment by sensing echoes from those objects. By actively creating sounds – for example, by tapping their canes, lightly stomping their foot or making clicking noises with their mouths – people trained to orientate with echolocation can interpret the sound waves reflected by nearby objects, accurately identifying their location and size. This ability is used by some blind people for acoustic wayfinding, or navigating within their environment using auditory rather than visual cues. It is similar in principle to active sonar and to the animal echolocation employed by some animals, including bats, dolphins and toothed whales.

Echolocation has been further developed by Daniel Kish, who works with the blind, leading blind teenagers hiking and mountain-biking through the wilderness and teaching them how to navigate new locations safely, with a technique that he calls "FlashSonar",[11] through the non-profit organization World Access for The Blind.[12] Kish had his eyes removed at the age of 13 months due to retinal cancer. He learned to make palatal clicks with his tongue when he was still a child -- and now trains other blind people in the use of echolocation and in what he calls "Perceptual Mobility".[13][14][15] Though at first resistant to using a cane for mobility, seeing it as a "handicapped" device, and considering himself "not handicapped at all", Kish developed a technique using his white cane combined with echolocation to further expand his mobility.[15][16][16][14]

Kish reports that "The sense of imagery is very rich for an experienced user. One can get a sense of beauty or starkness or whatever - from sound as well as echo".[11] He is able to distinguish a metal fence from a wooden one by the information returned by the echoes on the arrangement of the fence structures; in extremely quiet conditions, he can also hear the warmer and duller quality of the echoes from wood compared to metal.[11]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGMpswJtCdI&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpxEmD0gu0Q&feature=related