Sound You Can See
Imagine racing downhill on a mountain bike on a road littered with tiny obstacles, things you have to avoid or you'll crash. Oh, and your blind too. Sounds like an impossible task? It may not be for long. A new perception device invented by Leslie Kay of Sonic Vision, based in Canterbury, New Zealand, is helping the blind "see" with their ears, the same way bats and whales do. The headband like device, named Kaspa (for Kay's advanced spatial perception aid), relies on a new technology called "monocular perception," or seeing with sound. When worn on a person's head, the device sends out sound waves and times the echoes produced when the waves bounce off objects. That information is instantly turned into stereo tones the wearer can hear - the farther the object, the higher the pitch. "Zero distance equals zero pitch,' says Daniel Kish, executive director of the Los Angeles-based advocacy group World Access for the Blind, who took Kaspa out for a test run. "I was able to ride a bike down a mega-steep hill into the wind, without a hitch," explains Kish, who is also blind. Sonic Vision says Kaspa takes practice, but users catch on fast. It is now working on scaling down the size of the device, while increasing its range, and hopes to have it in production by next year.
-- Kelli Miller