The Echolocation Movement Gets Good Press on NBC News

Witnessing the evolution of a skill set that has the power to change people's lives so profoundly is a great feeling.  It's not often that such a wonderful new technology or revelation comes around that is able to do so much good for such a large body of people. The echolocation movement is just beginning now and I feel privileged to be a part of it.

Today this article and video was published on NBC's Today.com

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This first stage of the echolocation movement will provide the opportunity for many people who have never heard of echolocation to become aware of it. This is a critical step in the success of echolocation, because in order for blind people to adopt the practice of it, it is important that they feel comfortable taking it on and know that they will not be looked upon strangely during their training and practice.

It will still take a long time for echolocation, or biosonar to become a household word, but this is a huge step in helping that transition.  Thank you to all the good folks at NBC for airing this and helping to progress this incredible field.

New Echolocation Research Published at the University of Southampton

From a new study published by the University of Southampton:

The results showed that both sighted and blind people with good hearing, even if completely inexperienced with echolocation, showed the potential to use echoes to tell where objects are.

It is great to see this type of research being done to help aid the visually impaired community. When this type of thing has been studied in the past it is often to the benefit of science in general or discreet facets of the biology industry. Here we have a team of researchers dedicated to providing this information to help the blind mobility community and add more scientific framework to a mobility tool in need of this type of verification.

Researchers from the University of Southampton's Institute of Sound and Vibration Research (ISVR) and University of Cyprus conducted a series of experiments with sighted and blind human listeners, using a 'virtual auditory space' technique, to investigate the effects of the distance and orientation of a reflective object on ability to identify the right-versus-left position of the object. They used sounds with different bandwidths and durations (from 10-400 milliseconds) as well as various audio manipulations to investigate which aspects of the sounds were important. The virtual auditory space, which was created in ISVR's anechoic chamber, allowed researchers to remove positional clues unrelated to echoes, such as footsteps and the placement of an object, and to manipulate the sounds in ways that wouldn't be possible otherwise (e.g. get rid of the emission and present the echo only).

Read the rest of the article here:
http://www.southampton.ac.uk/engineering/news/2013/05/20_echolocation.page

Access the full report here:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378595513000737