Visual substitution
Humans’ vision involves more complex neural mechanisms and gathers distinctively more information than the other senses, the Re:Vision attempts to translate visual information into tactile “language” by artificial means, to discover the novel perceptual channel of humans. The ultimate question is how people use their own imagination to understand the subjective world.
Data transformation
Such as shapes, colours, etc., the subjective description of objects, are actually a perceptual language of our brain. Inspired by that this project designs a prototype, that represents visual information into tactile language. The successful visual substitution proves that the natural sensory organs' information can be perceived in another form through manual intervention.
The functional prototype
Hardware assembly
As an initial point, the system based on a Kinect camera for gathering the visual data is presented. The camera emitted thousands of invisible infrared rays to calculate objects' area at a certain distance. The environment towards the camera has diverted into multiple sections in the monitor. The collision of infrared rays in the different section would be activating different LED, depends on the number of the collisions the intensities of LEDs can also change autonomously.
Tactile signals simulation
The generator of tactile signals was designed to simulate the press stimuli using hub magnet, which was more accurate and similar to electrical stimulation. The Kinect motion sensor and the input simulation to head-mounted prototype can be attached to the head; the hub magnets, that on the annular housing mounted, can generate the stimuli and convey to the forehead.
Conclusion - Perceptual substitution
Machine cognition, artificial intelligence, the common research topics in recent years, show us how people’s daily lives would be like, the interaction between people and machines, and the external world becomes more complex. This project aims to propose a possibility: haptic as a kind of “low-res” perceptual language, can be described such quantity of information like vision. It can also be used as a new channel of the senses, using artificial sensors expand perception in humans.
The project paper was selected by the SIDeR conference 2019, for more infos please under Paper of Visual Substitution.