MetaModal LLC - The vOICe
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MetaModal LLC - The vOICe
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MetaModal LLC (Pasadena, California) is active in the field of sensory substitution,
in particular to enable blind users to "see with sound" by transforming images from
a wearable camera into sounds, using a technology known as The vOICe. One focus area
is to identify and establish benefits in the daily lives of blind users. Another focus
area is the learning and adaptation effort involved in obtaining these benefits.
Development and evaluation of effective training schemes is therefore a key element
in both focus areas. MetaModal LLC was founded by Luis Goncalves and Enrico Di Bernardo.
Note: most of the links below are external links that refer to the original website for The vOICe technology. |
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``There is increasing evidence from neuroscience for the extraordinarily
rich interconnectedness and interactions of the sensory areas of the
brain, and the difficulty, therefore, of saying that anything is purely
visual or purely auditory, or purely anything. This is evident in the
very tides of some recent papers – Pascual-Leone and his colleagues at
Harvard now write of "The Metamodal Organization of the Brain," and
Shinsuke Shimojo and his group at Caltech, who are also exploring
intersensory perceptual phenomena, recently published a paper called
"What You See Is What You Hear," and stress that sensory modalities
can never be considered in isolation. The world of the blind, of the
blinded, it seems, can be especially rich in such inbetween states – the
intersensory, the metamodal – states for which we have no common language.''
Oliver Sacks, The New Yorker, July 28 2003,
 "The Mind's Eye: What the Blind See" |
 The vOICe
vision technology for the totally blind offers the experience of live
camera views through sophisticated image-to-sound renderings. In theory this could
lead to synthetic vision with truly visual sensations ("qualia") through crossmodal
integration, by exploiting the existing multisensory processing and neural plasticity
of the human brain through training and education. The vOICe implements a form of
sensory substitution where the goal is to bind visual input to visual qualia with a
minimum of training time and effort. The vOICe also acts as a
research vehicle
for the cognitive sciences
to learn more about large-scale adaptive processes and cross-modal neuromodulation in
the human brain. Neuroscience research has already shown that the visual cortex of even
adult blind people can become responsive to sound, and sound-induced illusory flashes
can be evoked in most sighted people. The vOICe technology may now build on this with
live video from a head-mounted camera
encoded in sound. The extent to which cortical plasticity and dynamic rerouting allow
for functionally relevant rewiring or unmasking of neural pathways in the human brain
is under investigation. Apart from functional relevance, a cross-modal binding for
inducing visual sensations through sound (mental imagery
and artificial synesthesia)
would also be of great psychological importance. The possible role of The vOICe vision
technology in cross-modal neuromodulation and synesthetic effects is being explored and
developed under the Open Innovation paradigm together with many R&D partners around
the world.
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Copyright © 1996 - 2022 Peter B.L. Meijer
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