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The blind man who taught himself to see

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Re: The blind man who taught himself to see

#31

Post by StavrosK »

moblivu wrote: post #23
modernerd wrote: post #12

Daniel Kish was featured in Derren Brown's 'Misdirection' series. The clip here shows him using echolocation to describe the shape of a car and ride a bike: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjFcvixIRxs 'You might think of it like being in a choir or an orchestra... The world is like a living symphony... This car is kind of like an instrument, except that, instead of making its own sound, it's reflecting sounds I'm maki…

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)...

Re: The blind man who taught himself to see

#34

Post by Florin_Andrei »

stevejohnson wrote: post #33

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.

Yes and no.

There's something funny going on with front-back perception. Normally it shouldn't be doable, but the external part of the ear is like a direction-dependent frequency filter. When the brain hears a familiar sound, but the spectrum is skewed just like this, it goes "aha, this comes from the front side". If the spectrum is skewed the other way, it goes "this comes from behind".

It's not 100% reliable, but it works some times.

Re: The blind man who taught himself to see

#35

Post by BobbyH »

edw519 wrote: post #20

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 the K-Sonar approved as a medical device, I think he'd be able to get paid from deep-pocketed insurance companies too.

Improving the range (and doing research on inner-ear microphone implants) could be done in later versions (if mainstream blind customers really are interested in playing tennis, which I am skeptical about). If v1 makes people more independent, that's a huge deal already!

I bet he could get pretty far just by reallocating his existing $200k/year budget to commercializing the technology, which has the potential to be embraced by a lot more people than the blind people he is introduced to (only 10% of whom even get good at echolocation-through-clicking).

Re: The blind man who taught himself to see

#37

Post by sethg »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #34
stevejohnson wrote: post #33

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.

Yes and no. There's something funny going on with front-back perception. Normally it shouldn't be doable, but the external part of the ear is like a direction-dependent frequency filter. When the brain hears a familiar sound, but the spectrum is skewed just like this, it goes "aha, this comes from the front side". If the spectrum is skewed the other way, it goes "this comes from behind". It's not 100% reliable, but i…

Also: people who depend on behind-the-ear hearing aids do not get the benefit of these echoes, which means that, for example, it’s harder for them to distinguish the voice of someone talking to them from background noise or from echoes off the walls.

Re: The blind man who taught himself to see

#38

Post by vaporstun »

stevejohnson wrote: post #33

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, there is some post-processing in your mind due to the time delay between sounds entering your left ear and sounds entering your right. Just because your ears are aligned on a single axis does not mean that you cannot perceive in multiple axes. No moving of your head is necessary to perceive in more than one dimension.

Re: The blind man who taught himself to see

#39

Post by nevinera »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #34
stevejohnson wrote: post #33

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.

Yes and no. There's something funny going on with front-back perception. Normally it shouldn't be doable, but the external part of the ear is like a direction-dependent frequency filter. When the brain hears a familiar sound, but the spectrum is skewed just like this, it goes "aha, this comes from the front side". If the spectrum is skewed the other way, it goes "this comes from behind". It's not 100% reliable, but i…

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

There's a lot more to it than that, and it's not just something that occasionally works. The outer-ear notch filtering is also used in vertical localization.

Re: The blind man who taught himself to see

#40

Post by rokhayakebe »

yuvadam wrote: post #9
rokhayakebe wrote: post #4

How do you "explain" to someone who was born blind that he is "blind"?

Beautiful question. You could also ask if blind people are able to perceive vision in dreams. To which the answer, I believe, is that they simply cannot, due to the fact that their brains have no notion of a visual image.

This breaks my heart.
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