#hackblindness

[hackblindness-blog]

My eyes are a little strange looking.

[hackblindness-blog]

The Future of VR Helmets Could be more than Just Games

Oculus VR does a beautiful job functioning as an immersive gaming environment. Could it serve as an immersive audio creation environment? Even without the visual attributes that Oculus produces, I believe it could be a promising for gestural, non-visual sound creation. Oculus surrounds the user in a given environment, but does it track the movement of your hands? Mounting a Leap Motion sensor to the Oculus could be the answer here, however not very practical unless someone makes an attachable carriage to hold the Leap securely in place. (3D printing people, MAKE this, please!)   With the two devices, the user could use their ears to navigate, and hands to change an environment made of sound.

[hackblindness-blog]

Close your Eyes, Imagine

First off, HUGE thanks to Peter Kirn, Hypebot & Paul Lamere for spreading the word about Hack Blindness. I was crying actual tears of happiness yesterday from the downpour of support that is happening over at CDM. Responding to everyone is going to take some time, but a gigantic THANK YOU is a good start. 

Thoughts on Text-to-Speech [TTS]

Many people have already made software that uses text-to-speech to give the user a variety of information about what is happening on their screen. There are some very good things about this type of software, but I don’t think it has a strong place in music production and music performance software. I believe text-to-speech in this application gets in the way of what musicians and their audiences hear. Personally, I don’t need to know that my reverb level is at 62% because I can just hear it. Sure, I would like to know which parameter I am working in, but I could have complete control over that with my computer keyboard.

Remember: The non-visual musician has the ears of a fox.

There are other means of sensory replacement that could be used to allow the software to communicate with the user and vice versa. Haptic feedback and devices like the Syntact™ allow us to touch sound.

I’m not cracking on TTS in general. I think it is an extremely important product for the visually impaired. I use it myself when I work on the computer. Along with screen magnifiers, a good pair of sunglasses and extra brightness/contrast & color enhancements, my eyes get a chance to relax.

I challenge all of you, think of this with your eyes closed, now reach out...touch the sound, pick it up, move it around.

[hackblindness-blog]

the vOICe

Useful Applications for the Visually Impaired

I installed The Voice for Android on my Acer Picasso last week. This app allows your ears to see by turning what your camera sees into an audio signal. 

The vOICe for Android application adds a sonic augmented reality overlay to the live camera view in real-time, thereby giving even totally blind people live and detailed information about their visual environment that they would otherwise not perceive. It may also serve as an interactive mobile learning app for teaching visual concepts to blind children. The vOICe for Android is a universal translator for mapping images to sounds. 

I plugged in an 1/8" to 1/8" cable from my tablet into the mic input on my PC. I wish their was a better way to get a screen grab - but my device is not rooted. To record the screen I plugged in my old webcam and changed the audio input to record from the tablet. The video quality is poor, at best-but the audio is quite good...and you get a general overview of the application's functionality.

[hackblindness-blog]

Possibilites

Ideas for Navigation Using a keyboard might be helpful to bring up tracks and apply effects. For example, hold 'R' to bring up a reverb unit, apply modifying keys to select additional parameters & add a gesture up or down to adjust the level of the parameter. 

A Few Existing Github Projects Perhaps something like this could be applied to a non-visual interface.

KinectDJ A sound effector (or controller) which can control by Kinect sensor. 

KinectGestures Basic Kinect API demo app, featuring upper body interpolation, some basic gestures and sound effects on trigger. KinectRecord App with GUI for recording Kinect depth maps with sync sound. Might not work; try Kinect_justrecord for simple depth map recording instead. Requires SimpleOpenNI.