Bat Vision
Bat Vision is an application that is trying to simulate echolocation as, for instance, witnessed by bats. Bats navigate by making high pitch noises (normally inaudible for human ears) and using the duration of this noise to return to form a mental map of the close area. This can be called the “vision” of bats or echolocation. This application lets users experience this echolocation by blocking their normal vision (simulated by a live video feed from the webcam) and making it available only when a burst of loud noise is registered by the microphone. This is demonstrated and explained further in the video below.
The application is inspired by reading Richard Dawkins’ book: The Blind Watchmaker wherein he writes about the (extra)ordinary evolutionary process needed to use the kind of echolocation bats do. In Chapter two of The Blind Watchmaker Dawkins writes: “the higher the pitch of a sound, the better it is for accurate sonar. This is because low-pitched sounds have long wavelengths which cannot resolve the difference between closely spaced objects.” I’ve applied this concept in my echolocation-simulation for humans by using the average pitch registered by the microphone to generate a sensitivity of the vision. The higher one hoots into the microphone, the more layers of detail are shown to them.
The idea, which I could not get to work, is to incorporate this application in a virtual reality device and let the users navigate (for instance in a maze) by using their voice to see around. Furthermore an improvement would be to offer a higher resolution to the users. As you can see in the video is the number of layers (or resolution) served to the user still very low since I hardly got the XBOX Kinect working which can offer a better depth vision. Right now it is done by two different cameras at a slightly different angle to determine how far an object is from them.
(version without music)