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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."
When you drive, you can't look at the speedometer and the road at the same time,
That's what I tried to tell him...
The coolest voice ever.
We did some experiments with this in cognitive theory class, and it was really, really bizarre.
I heard about something on a TV show a few years ago. It talked about some guy who was training deaf people to "echolocate" using clicks. Supposedly, they were able to walk, tell the diff between walls and shrubs, and even skateboard. Does anyone know about this?
"73% of quotes on the Internet are made up" -Ben Franklin
and they still havent helped me pick up the perfect who-likes-short-shorts bat woman.
Maybe I missed something, but can't this be used to help the blind navigate around their homes or even outdoors? It's the first thing I would think of rather than fighter pilots.
If you think of the human body as a computer. This would be equivalent to discovering a new port through which we can recieve additional information.
It means that we might be able to absorb more information faster and easier.
I remember some 5 or 6 years ago I saw a story on some daytime talk show about people overcoming their disabilities; not that it's all that unusual, but one guest in particular who has been blind since birth, actually used echolocation to get around. He made regular clicking sounds with his tounge and he could navigate down a city street without any real assistance. It was actually quite amazing. Although, I don't know any blind fighter pilots but the principal is sound. Humans do have echolocation abilities, it would just take a long time time to develop any natural ability.
Holy smoke! The penguin thinks he can escape us into that smokescreen! Quick, Robin, give me the bat-sonar-headphones!
What you hear in Star Wars isn't sound in space, it's echolocation technology.
David Dunn's Angels and Insects, although not a study of audio based VR (or even featuring bat sounds for that matter), is a great place to get started listening to microscopic sounds.
Here's an MP3 of some insects in Africa getting it on.
If you think this stuff sounds like fun you might want to do what I did a few years ago and pick up a high quality microphone with a big diaphragm, such as an AKG C414, and get out into the woods at night and make some recordings. You'll be surprised what's out there when you start filtering out the sounds humans make and crank the volume!!
I bet I could get a blind-deaf person to navigate using only taste! Strap two solar cells to their forehead and run the wires to opposite sides of their tongue! Hey, it's only 1-pixel stereo vision, but better than nothing.
...
For as long as I can remember, I've been able to echolocate people moving around me while I'm near a CRT -- especially when I'm sitting at a computer. I can...shall we say, "feel" the movements of people behind me. (It's a spatial sense. Not sure how else to describe it.) It's not as if I can tell what they're doing with their hands or anything detailed like that (you know, dodging projectiles and such), but I'm aware of their general position.
So now, of course, my primary machine has an LCD. No more echolocation. (Luckily, it's a laptop, so I can keep my back to the wall.) I don't have the 15.7 KHz whine of an electron tube to bounce off things around me. Ye gods, that infernal CRT whine...most people can't hear it, but it drives me bats.
Oh dear. In all honesty, I wasn't trying to pun.
Damn, this is the coolest thing I've read in a long time! Imagine having a second set of low grade eye that worked in the dark. You could do all sorts of cool things with it, like effectively having a set of eyes on the back of your head.
The article mentions one potential application being that you could look at dials and switces without taking your eyes off what you were doing. However, would shifting your attention to echo location be as bad as looking away would? Think cell phones. It's kind of like chameleons - they can point their eyes in different directions, but can they concentrate on both of them at the same time? Could humans gain the ability to concentrate on more than one sensory input at a time? Probably not, but the input would still be there and would catch our attention anytime something notable happened. Like when we see something out of the corner of our eye, or hear our name in a crowd. Cognetics is so cool.
It also talked about how bats adjust the frequency of the waves sent out, as the distance to the object changes. I imagine for a bat this would be as automatic as focusing our eyes is to us. We would have to do this manualy, like focusing a camera. Oh, but what if we interfaced the brain or some nerves and trained the mind to do the focusing!
I've always thought that if I were to loose a limb in an accident I would be pounding down doors at universities acrossed the country to find one willing to attempt to use the nerves once controlling my limb to instead control a keyboard/mouse type interface (which would comunicate to the PC via bluetooth eventually). But this is even cooler, and I imagine provided a little information from Dean waters on this, you could build something like this on your own. Hot damn, I have a new project!
Or imagine a radar system encoding direction, distance and speed of a target into some surround sound system...
To me, especially the threat warning system looks interesting, because you can hear something even if it's behind you, while your eyes only see stuff in front of you. Imagine, the advantage if you can hear at once that that radar site that just started chirping seems to be in the direction of the depression in the ridge you just passed so you can do something about it, or the fighter radar that just started chirping is at your 6 o'clock - that guy is in a bad position... wait, now he's switched from search to attack mode - now you're in trouble... ;-]
Or if you could hear the drone of your wingman - you'd definitely hear if he gets out of position...
Cheers, Ulli
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
As anyone with bad hearing in one ear (like me) will attest, stereo location using sound is a very weak sense. Having worked with stereoscopic 3D images for many years, I have found that about 10-20% of all people have vision problems in one eye that are just bad enough that they can't see the stereographic effect. I expect that similarly, there are enough people with weak hearing in one ear, enough to prevent a similarly large group from using audio stereolocation.
this probably only works if there is only one "clicker" in the area. Otherwise you'd get your echoes confused with the others, with embarassing results. Also, there must be some relatively low velocity limit, since your interpretation of the echo likely depends on (your knowledge of) the origination point of the audio source. I bet parking meters and telephone poles are quite stealthy against this technology. Rather than trying to navigate yourself down a straight hallway alone, try blindfolding a bunch of people and get them to echolocate around a circle - better than twister!
but.. tihs is aonhter ltitle kwon slkil
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
bite my glorious golden ass.
Not really. You're thinking in terms of radar, where azimuth and range are determined by matching a single ping with a single pong. In such systems, multiple sources or multiple path replies are a source of confusion since they add too much information to the process. If you're trying to paint a sonic landscape, however, you don't want to try and associate a single ping and pong since that would only identify the range to a single reflector in one small portion of your area of interest. Instead, you want to receive as much information about the environment as possible from each ping. Having someone/something else making the ping isn't a problem as long as they don't overwhelm the replies.
As an experiment, try sitting in a place with a fair amount of white noise (such as CPU fans). Now slowly bring your right hand toward your ear with your palm open. The first thing you'll notice is a loss of some higher frequency ambient sounds from the right side. As the hand gets closer, you may notice an increase in reflected noises that originated on your left. Eventually you will be able to judge the distance between your ear and your palm simply by the tone of the noise.
Pprhaes I was a llttie too qciuk wtih my psaire and esuianthtam. I jsut took a bcnuh of sectennes and ran samilir scnramblig prescesos oevr tehm, and smoe wree qutie unrdalbeae. I tnihk taht, prhapes, the oraginil scnetnee was clferauly curtsnocted to be screlambd, yet esay to raed, in oerdr to spaerd the meme. Pahreps?
bite my glorious golden ass.
...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
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.