Sound View Seeing with Sound Kees van den

Sound. View: Seeing with Sound Kees van den Doel, Daniel Smilek, and Alan Kingstone Departments of Computer Science and Psychology University of British Columbia Summary Sound. View is a software vision system for the blind, which displays a color image through touch and hearing. The image is transformed into a virtual surface with a fine-grained color dependent roughness texture. The user scratches the surface and the sound produced depends on the motion as well as on the color of the area explored. User studies have been performed to compare Sound. View to The v. OICe, the only other comparable vision substitute. Mean accuracy on a 6 alternative forced choice test was significantly higher for individuals using Sound. View (66%) than for those using v. OICe (29%), t(58) = 5. 209, p < 0. 001. Synthesize Sounds A real-time sound synthesis kernel computes the sounds produced by scraping the surface. The sound depends on the speed, pressure, and color. User Tests: Shapes Sighted untrained users are shown simple b/w shapes. Freehand drawing experiments and forced choice experiments were performed. Selected Results Scrape Display Surface Acquire/Display Image First an image is acquired and digitized. The colors are transformed into roughness textures. Black is smooth, white is rough, and colors have a periodic structure. The user will scrape the surface and listen to the sounds produced. A mental map of the surface structure is the image that is “seen”. Of 31 subjects, 70% recognize shape. 93% recognizes triangle, 50% recognize circle with hole. 90% detects if there is a hole or not. 5 subjects scored 100%, 5 subjects scored 50% or less.