Hi Colin and All,

Your cautions about issues in learning to see are well taken.
Technology alone will not solve all problems. Retinal implants,
although a great development, can only help with certain eye
diseases. Likewise, the effectiveness of brain implants in
the visual cortex will likely be hampered by a differently
organized "visual" cortex in early blind people. For early
blind people having normal hearing, seeing with sound might be
one remaining option, but indeed mastering the interpretation of
visual information from a camera as now translated into complex
sounds remains a major endeavour. It is for this reason that
The vOICe seeing-with-sound software is currently called the
"Learning Edition", and for the time being we have to remain
very careful about what can be achieved with this approach.
Hopefully, we will know more about this in a few years from
now, depending on the efforts of pioneering blind volunteers.

Best wishes,

Peter Meijer


Seeing with Sound - The vOICe
http://www.seeingwithsound.com/winvoice.htm


Colin R. Howard wrote

> Greetings,
>
> Though interesting and bears much hope of success, I suspect this is really
> only going to be useful to those who have had sight and lost it.  for, if a
> person has never been able to see, is maybe well into adulthood, how is the
> brain taught the way of seeing?  A totally blind person who has never been
> able to see, cannot appreciate how, for instance, a three-dimensional
> object can be represented on a two-dimensional surface and how does one
> teach the brain about perspective?  Maybe it would be possible for the
> brain to "learn" in much the same way that a stroke victim "learns" to
> "speak" by using some other less-a-activated part of the brain.  In all
> such cases, though there is always much gain, the abilities are far lower
> than would be naturally the situation.  so, I suspect if it is found the
> brain can learn to "see" through these eyes, it will be a fairly long and
> tortuous process.
>
> I really hope my cautions are proved wrong and that we can easily learn but
> I foresee the strain of suddenly moving from the "world of the blind" to
> "the world of the (hopefully) normally sighted" will be difficult and need
> much suport.
>
> I just wonder how people could be trained to help in such situations for
> it's a totally new area and will have a very large learning curve.
>
> Cheers.


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