Kees van den Doel, Daniel Smilek, and Alan Kingstone

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SoundView Seeing with Sound
Kees van den Doel, Daniel Smilek, and Alan
Kingstone Departments of Computer Science and
Psychology University of British Columbia
Synthesize Sounds
Summary
User Tests Shapes
SoundView 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 SoundView to The vOICe, the only other
comparable vision substitute. Mean accuracy on a
6 alternative forced choice test was
significantly higher for individuals using
SoundView (66) than for those using vOICe (29),
t(58) 5.209, p lt 0.001.
A real-time sound synthesis kernel computes the
sounds produced by scraping the surface. The
sound depends on the speed, pressure, and color.
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.
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.
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.