IT’S not quite bat-style echolocation, but people could soon use sound to help them see. A portable navigational aid that transmits soft, low-pitched beeps directly to the inner ear has been designed to help blind people navigate around cities or guide firefighters through smoke-clogged buildings.
The system guides users with beeps that appear to come from whatever direction the person needs to head in. “We have the user simply walk towards the sound,” says Bruce Walker at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, who created the device with colleague Frank Dellaert.
To calculate the user’s position and the direction…
