61–70 of 87 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's probably the only all-in-one-page version of the article. Although I do agree the dialog popping up at the beginning is annoying, it's only one click (or key) to dismiss it; I prefer that to having to click on several "next page" links.
Then surely it makes sense to link to the root page which has a (single-click) link to the print page?
Still very cool.
Kish figures it would require $15 million to prove whether or not his idea is feasible. He fears he’ll never get the opportunity. Sounds like he needs some real angels, those who measure the success of their investment in something bigger than dollars. How does one go about finding and pitching to them?
Can't he use lean startup principles to launch with his existing device that offers an improvement over a cane, instead of raising $15 MM to offer a perfect product that lets blind people play tennis? If I were blind, I would surely pay thousands of dollars for the K-Sonar device if it could enhance my sensory input beyond "what I feel with my cane within 2 feet" to "everything around me within 15 feet". If he got th…
There is an easy(cheap, i'd say tens of dollars, see prices for ultrasound parking sensors) implementable "virtual cane" : the pair of laser (like in laser pointer) + receiver + small chip which would re-scale the sensor output to the hand from light speed scale (10m / 300000 m/s = 0.00003s ) to the tactile feedback scale - tenths of a second. The same can be done with ultrasound. The both can be even paired, for precision and cases of say low light (or sound) reflecting surfaces.
The main problem i think is that blind people have their hands full just trying to live the life, while non-blind don't care and or passionate enough to cross the threshold into doing something. The guy in the article is just a miraculous exception.
I really enjoyed this article. I do take issue with a couple of sentences: "We hear in stereo 3-D." This is not true unless we move our heads. We hear in one dimension, left-to-right. "We hear better than we see." This is an apples-to-monkeys comparison.
> "We hear in stereo 3-D." This is not true unless we move our heads. We hear in one dimension, left-to-right. Put on some headphones and listen to this and tell me you cannot visualize it in 3-D: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuxaOO6PsAw This is a binaural recording. More info on these here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_recording You can hear in multiple dimensions because, as the original article mentions…
I really enjoyed this article. I do take issue with a couple of sentences: "We hear in stereo 3-D." This is not true unless we move our heads. We hear in one dimension, left-to-right. "We hear better than we see." This is an apples-to-monkeys comparison.
Another is the phase difference of the sounds in both ears. Phase difference comes from the fact that sound arriving at one ear had a longer way to travel than sound arriving at the other ear. tells a more complete story of direction than loudness and is very precise.
Thirdly, there is frequency response. Both our head and our ears absorb different frequencies at different angles. Also, there are some reflections from our shoulders and chest.
Taken all that together, normal people can detect the origin of sound sources to about one degree of precision.
But, there is more. Close your eyes and have another person talk while turning his head in different directions. You can clearly detect the direction he is talking to. At the same time, you can roughly sense the size and type of the room you are in. Also, you can do this while being in really noisy environments (say, a car in traffic with the radio playing and the kids in the back).
Talking about seeing vs. hearing: The response time of the ear is about 10-50 ms. It usually takes 200-500 ms to make sense of something you see. The human ear has a frequency resolution of about one Hz (at any spectral distribution with great precision, while the eye only detects three distinct spectral windows.
So in a lot of ways, the ear is physically way more precise than the eye. Of course, signal processing makes all the difference and the amount of signal processing going on in our acoustical and visual brain centers is just staggering. There is nothing in the technological world that even comes close to that.
How do you "explain" to someone who was born blind that he is "blind"?
On Reddit recently, in an "I am blind, ask me anything" thread, this comment appeared: "Do you see blackness all the time?" "No, I don't know what blackness is; I see the same as you see out of the bottom of your feet".
I really enjoyed this article. I do take issue with a couple of sentences: "We hear in stereo 3-D." This is not true unless we move our heads. We hear in one dimension, left-to-right. "We hear better than we see." This is an apples-to-monkeys comparison.
We can hear true 3D. There are actually a couple of ways in which we can sense the direction of sound. One is loudness, which obviously only works for left-right. This is loudness only in the sense of sound-gets-more-silent-farther-from-the-source. Another is the phase difference of the sounds in both ears. Phase difference comes from the fact that sound arriving at one ear had a longer way to travel than sound arriv…
(eta: just posting the link seems kinda snarky -- this ties into your post, but i don't have anything else to add)
Kish figures it would require $15 million to prove whether or not his idea is feasible. He fears he’ll never get the opportunity. Sounds like he needs some real angels, those who measure the success of their investment in something bigger than dollars. How does one go about finding and pitching to them?
Can't he use lean startup principles to launch with his existing device that offers an improvement over a cane, instead of raising $15 MM to offer a perfect product that lets blind people play tennis? If I were blind, I would surely pay thousands of dollars for the K-Sonar device if it could enhance my sensory input beyond "what I feel with my cane within 2 feet" to "everything around me within 15 feet". If he got th…
Even Steve Blank recognizes the model doesn't fit for medical devices.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed! Unfortunatly we will never be able to practice Echolocation. Imagine if we are able to give him back vision.... What will he be able to do from there !
Why won't we be able to practice echolocation? There's nothing stopping you (apart from the fact that it's not very useful when you can see)...