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Echolocation for Humans
anoopsinha writes "An article in New Scientist reports that bat echos can be used as virtual reality guide. People wearing headphones could easily hunt down a 'virtual insect', using only the echolocation sounds. The report says that it is a 'very intuitive process.' The researchers behind the project hope that a similar system in the cockpit of fighter planes could allow pilots to track some controls using their hearing, freeing up their eyes for other tasks."
It's been done.
Ewige Blumenkraft.
Griffin "re-discovered" echolocation in bats in the 1940's. Griffin also discusses the discovery of bat echolocation in the 1700's.
I'm pretty sure it was _Scientific American Frontiers_ on PBS.. a quick google only found this though:
"Seeing" Sounds: Echolocation by Blind Humans
This was actually used in the show Babylon 5. If I am remembering the posts online by the exec. producer and main writer, JMS, he said that they wanted to use sound effects for space battles but also wanted to be accurate to the reality of space where there shouldn't be any sound.
So the technique they used was to describe the sound effects as assistive to the pilots like full surround sound in video games to give a viceral sense the position of the other things around. They maybe explained that a total of once of twice on the series itself, but the idea stuck with me as a very good idea even in the relatively normal environment of todays fighter jets or even for situational awareness in cars on the highway.
Is this the end yet?...How 'bout now...how 'bout now...how 'bout now?
Surprisingly this, too, has been done , albeit in a slightly more complex form.
Ewige Blumenkraft.
From one of the definitions in the google glossary:
From your post, it looks like you just found out what a meme is and how it spreads firsthand.Of course you did. Blind people use this all the time, it is referred to properly as the "obstacle sense".
At one time this amazed scientists - blind people could walk through a room without hitting objects. So, they covered their bodies in thick felt, and the blind still had their obstacle sense. Then, they filled their ears with wax, and the blind bumped into things.
Sighted people lack the obstacle sense, but can learn it in a few hours. No clicking or other extra noise generation is necessary.
...well, for sports at any rate.
Now, first things first, I'm not totally blind but I am legally blind. I have Achromatopsia, so I don't see a whole heck of a lot outside yet I can still play soccer, baseball, basketball (especially), Disc Golf and Ultimate Frisbee because I can hear what's going on around me at all times. I don't have to see where my disc lands I listen for the "thunk", with soccer and baseball there have been "beeper" balls for a long time and in basketball there are always sounds to let you know where the ball is (dribbling, passing, team mates, etc).
Now, this technology couldn't be used en masse as another post pointed out because there would be too much interferance from others and using headphones would block out other important sounds like traffic and other pedestrians.
Anywho, my $0.02
crazy dynamite monkey
SF writer Arthur Clarke wrote an essay about the senses humans have and don't have. He reported seeing a blind man referee a table tennis game, successfully. Clarke also mention playing table tennis under a tin roof once. When it started raining, his game collapsed.
Apparently we're better than we know at pinpointing sharp sounds in the environment.
There were a series of article written back in the early 80's in Sport Aviation, the house organ of the Experimental Aviation Association, about a radar system for light planes that worked in a similar way. The guy had built extremely cheap, short range (two miles, say) radars out of coffee cans. He mounted two of them in an airplane, pointed 45 degrees to the left and right of the centerline, and rigged stereo headphones to them. The idea would be that you could hear other traffic in the air, and then locate them with your eyes to see and avoid them.
It's surprisingly hard to pick up light planes visually, they are tiny specks right up until the time that they fill the windshield. The response of the FAA has been the TCAS systems -- which are extremely complex and eyewateringly expensive (about $1M per system) This makes sense for jetliners, but is out of the question for light planes.
As near as I can tell, nobody did anything with the BINCAS system after the articles came out. It was a cool idea, though.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Not all seeing people are missing it. As a sound technician, this is a side-effect that I've noticed I got as I increased my audio awareness.
It's based mostly upon hearing the doppler effect from objects that are around us as circulating air hits things. Almost everyone can probably hear these sounds, but they're mostly low frequency and rather quiet, like whispers. The real trouble in doing it is picking the sounds out of all the other random sounds you hear. I've quite gotten used to having the sense. It's incredibly useful when driving, because cars displace a lot of air (which, as I said, causes this effect), and you can hear them on every side and determine their speed relative to your own with relative success fairly easily.
Now, though, it freaks me out when it's cold and I have to cover up my head. I get the feeling that something is following me (because I can't "feel" anything behind me).
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
That's not a completely random reordering of the letters in each word, though. One of the key signals the brain interprets when looking at words is the shape of the outline. It looks for clusters of ascenders and descenders as clues as to what the word might be. The text above tends to preserve these groupings more than a completely random approach would (look at 'wlohe', 'tihng' for example). Some important contextual clues are also preserved, like double 't's in 'ltteers', the 'gh' in 'rghit', the 'n't' at the end of 'deosn't', and so on. And of course the process completely preserves the ordering of words of three letters or less.
I've been an editor and proofreader, and the fact that misspelled words can easily be overlooked in context because your brain imposes error correction is well known in those professions - proofreaders have to train themselves to isolate each word and look past their brain's interpretation of what it says to see what it really says.
What's amazing is that you probably don't have to be that careful a reader to pick up that 'rscheearch' and 'iprmoetnt' were spelled incorrectly - they both jar your brain a little more than every other word in the paragraph. So it's not an excuse to just start spelling words any way you please - you still need to know what letters you need in each word.
I agree with AC; it seems to work with spanish (wich by the way, it's very much written how it's pronounced, and vice versa).
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Practically every other European language has these contructs, both Latin (French, Italian, Spanish, Portugese and, of course Latin itself) and Germanic languages (German, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish).
English is the only language that has dropped gender (analog to der/die/das in German or le/la in French) and different forms of address (du/Sie in German, tu/Vous in French) which, despite your ignorant claim to the contrary, have nothing to do with "lords and slaves" (which haven't existed in Germany or anywhere else for a lot longer than in the US, which only abolished slavery in the 1860s) but rather are used in different situations - when you go to an interview for a new job, you address the interviewer "Sie" (and not "du") and the interviewer does likewise. When you are talking to people at a party or likewise, you'd much sooner use "du" rather than "Sie" which is formal and uptight.