Peter Seymour wrote

> That being said, I prefer my earlier solution: wearing
> a miniature camera and speaking to a person at a monitor
> who seeing the world from a blind person's lapel.

> Equally important, the necessary technology (miniature
> cameras, microphones and earphones, a connection via
> cell phone technology, and an interactive monitor with
> audio) is already here. Further, the training time to
> use it would be less than hour.

Yes, this is an excellent idea. The nice thing is that
you might use the same hardware to work either way.

Using a portable videoconferencing setup with your camera
not pointing to your face but to the scene that the person
on the other end has to describe will basically provide
what you propose. On the other hand, for reasons of
privacy you may not always want some other person
looking where you are looking. Also, apart from a
number of resource and cost issues, having another
person describe the scene inevitably involves a kind
of censorship, even if well-intended, because he or she
has to (help) select what is considered important in the
visual scene: describing every detail via speech just
takes far too much time, and in the mean-time the scene
will have changed. Having to accept the necessity of
relying on someone else's eyes to accomplish some tasks,
like LAMENDEZ put it, is also an issue, even though the
perception of dependency may be objectively misplaced
as he later suggested.

The vOICe technology strives to overcome, or complement,
some of these issues by providing an uncensored and very
complete representation of the visual information in any
scene. The generated soundscapes corresponding to the video
have a fixed, but user-selectable, duration. The major
disadvantage is complexity: giving uncensored information
means that the system does not even attempt to interpret
the visual information for you, and it is up to you to
learn to deal with and interpret the complex soundscapes
of live video images. No one knows how far people (you)
can learn to get with this. Having invented a piano would
not necessarily imply that people can learn to play Chopin
on it! Training and learnability are major unexplored issues.
Motivation and endurance too, because just as with learning
to play a musical instrument, the progress in learning can
be frustratingly slow. I have played the piano, so I know. <g>

Still, some of features in The vOICe software, such as
the color identification option and the latest auditory
function plot option (for math) can be used with little
or no training effort.

A final note: it was correctly pointed out by one reader
that the name "seeing eye" is in use by a premier guide
dog training school. I'd like to stress that I only used
this phrase in citing because the Wired News reporter
had chosen the subject title "seeing eye software" for
her article about my software, subsequently leading to
the title of this thread. It is not my own naming, nor do
I wish to use it other than in referring to the Wired News
article. My own Windows-95/98/NT video to sound software
is called "The vOICe Learning Edition - Seeing with your
Ears", as available from the web page

   http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Peter_Meijer/winvoice.htm

Best wishes,

Peter Meijer


E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Soundscapes from The vOICe - Seeing with your Ears!
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Peter_Meijer/


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