Echolocation for Humans

anoopsinha writes "An article in New Scientist reports that bat echos can be used as virtual reality guide. People wearing headphones could easily hunt down a 'virtual insect', using only the echolocation sounds. The report says that it is a 'very intuitive process.' The researchers behind the project hope that a similar system in the cockpit of fighter planes could allow pilots to track some controls using their hearing, freeing up their eyes for other tasks."

Vindicated

[Faust7]

When you drive, you can't look at the speedometer and the road at the same time,

That's what I tried to tell him...

shameless reply

[gfody]

but.. tihs is aonhter ltitle kwon slkil

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Re:shameless reply

[Ignis Flatus]

Taht's cool as hlel.

Re:shameless reply

[alphaseven]

You know what's strange, how hundreds of weblogs [google.com] all suddenly decided to include that text this weekend, starting on the 12th. Quite a quick meme.

Re:shameless reply - Even Google understands

[Frans Faase]

It seems even Google understands it, because the search results started with: "Do you mean: According research".

Amazing

[JusTyler]

I was about to launch into cries of "idiot", "troll", and "crazy man", but two lines into your post I totally realized what was going on. That's pretty amazing stuff! And a bit spooky too when you're reading away at normal speed and know exactly what it says.

It does, however, highlight the importance of context and knowledge, since Cmabrigde could be read as anything if we didn't all know about Cambridge.

had to try for myself.. btw, whats a meme?

[gfody]

Pprhaes I was a llttie too qciuk wtih my psaire and esuianthtam. I jsut took a bcnuh of sectennes and ran samilir scnramblig prescesos oevr tehm, and smoe wree qutie unrdalbeae. I tnihk taht, prhapes, the oraginil scnetnee was clferauly curtsnocted to be screlambd, yet esay to raed, in oerdr to spaerd the meme. Pahreps?

Re:had to try for myself.. btw, whats a meme?

[alphaseven]

btw, what's a meme?

From one of the definitions in the google glossary [google.com]:

A contagious information pattern that replicates by parasitically infecting human minds and altering their behavior, causing them to propagate the pattern.

From your post, it looks like you just found out what a meme is and how it spreads firsthand.

Re:had to try for myself.. btw, whats a meme?

[Archangel_Azazel]

As a sidenote, there's a great book called _Thought Contagion_, although I don't remember who it's by. If you're interested in Memeonics (The study of Memes.) check out that book.

Re:had to try for myself.. btw, whats a meme?

[jafiwam]

Actually, for those of us who are partially dyslexic (sp) in the way I am your sentence is only a little bit harder to read than normal ones.

Note however that I can buffer load more than a single word at once, phrases or whole sentences can be read at a time. Re-arranging word order on those would probably not work to well.

Your sentence simply requires me to focus on each word singly, otherwise, no problem. (Just like reading upside down, each word has to be flipped individually then read. Upside down r

Perl script to do this for you

[JusTyler]

$_ = "A significantly amazing demonstration of scrambled words.";
s/(\b\w)(\w+)(?=\w\b)/$1 . &shuffle($2)/ge;
print;

sub shuffle {
my @z = split //, $_[0];
return join '', map { $z[$_->[0]] }
sort { $a->[1] <=> $b->[1] }
map { [$_ , rand ($#z ^ 2)] } (0..$#z);
}

Re:shameless reply

[cybermace5]

That's old news, Slashdot editors have been on that from day one! ;-)

Try it ylrsuoef -- smcbrlae aritarbry txet

[delta407]

I wrtoe a llitte sprcit in PHP taht dtaemrntesos tihs bivaoher. Cehck it out [lerfjhax.com]. I tnhik it's ptetry cool.

(Of crouse, scroue cdoe [lerfjhax.com] is mdae aivllabae uednr the GPL.)

Re:shameless reply

[Scarblac]

Wow. Cool. Compare that to sentences like this:

This gubblick contains many nonsklarkish English flutzpahs, but the overall pluggandisp can be glorked from context"
(David Moser, quoted by Douglas Hofstadter in his "Metamagical Themas" column in the January 1981 "Scientific American")

The conclusion is that the human brain is a very weird thing indeed :-)

Re:shameless reply

[hawkestein]

Lewis Carroll put this to good use in "Jabberwocky"

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Re:shameless reply

[kosmonaut pirx]

Interesting, but seems to be an english phenomenon. I tried the same letter-shifting in a german sentence, and it was totally unreadable. As i am a native german, i shouldn't have had any problems, if this would work in german.

Are there experiences with other languages?

Greetings,

Kosmo

Re:shameless reply

[kzadot]

Yeah, it works with english and most other languages, but german is an exception because of its overuse of single-syllable stems, conjugation, and its excessivley rigid fixation with writing things how they are pronounced and vice versa.

Thats also why its stuck in the middle ages with useless contructs like gender and different forms of address, for lords and slaves.

It really needs to free itself up a bit more and evolve like english did. Remember english started out as german, but its flexibility permit

Re:shameless reply

[Punto]

I agree with AC; it seems to work with spanish (wich by the way, it's very much written how it's pronounced, and vice versa).

Re:shameless reply

[aziraphale]

That's not a completely random reordering of the letters in each word, though. One of the key signals the brain interprets when looking at words is the shape of the outline. It looks for clusters of ascenders and descenders as clues as to what the word might be. The text above tends to preserve these groupings more than a completely random approach would (look at 'wlohe', 'tihng' for example). Some important contextual clues are also preserved, like double 't's in 'ltteers', the 'gh' in 'rghit', the 'n't' a

Re:shameless reply

[chris_sawtell]

Does this prove that the ideograph languages are better at getting the message across?

Re:shameless reply

[gobbo]

Similarly, studies done on hearing and listening have shown that the human voice has special status in our perceptual filters: radio messages missing key phonemes or words are easy enough to put together for the listener, if they are replaced by the ambient static. However, when replaced by silence they are much more difficult to piece together, since sudden silence takes perceptual priority.

Re:shameless reply

[gfody]

Try this. Scroll a line of text off the screen (or cover it up with another window) such that you can only see a one or two pixel strip of the top. You can still read it!

Re:Vindicated

[Zakabog]

You can't look at the speedometer and the road at the same time but you can see both. If you're looking at the road you can still see your speedometer and that little needle. All you really need to know is where most of the numbers are on your speedometer. And 55 is usually a red line near the top, when you're driving on the highway you'll know when you're doing 55 cause the red needle and the red line will be together and it's easy to see without looking at it. Of course it's always nice to know your e

Give it a try!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a skill we rely on overly, but you'll find you have it. Try closing your eyes and walking down a hallway. Eventually you'll brush against the wall. Try it again, making clicks with your tongue or other brief sounds. Even in an environment that doesn't echo much, you'll be surprised to find yourself in or near the center of the hallway at the other end.

We did some experiments with this in cognitive theory class, and it was really, really bizarre.

Re:Give it a try!

[turk182x2001]

I'm pretty sure this is the same technique I use to find my porn movies in the dark......

Already knew it..

[schon]

I've been doing this for ages - there is a hallway at work where the light switch is at the far end of the hall.. in winter, the hall is completely dark after 4PM or so.

making clicks with your tongue or other brief sounds

Actually, I just use my footfalls - I've got extremely sensitive hearing (I always know where our cat is because I can hear his footfalls on the carpet - which freaked out my wife for the first few years :o) so I don't need to make 'extra' sounds..

Re:Give it a try!

[korielgraculus]

Who do I sue about my broken nose?

Re:Give it a try!

[Dunark]

Did anyone ever notice how a live recording of a meeting sounds echoy, but it didn't seem that way when you were hearing it live? The echoes were there, but our hearing has a way of subtracting them out so we can hear what we're paying attention to more clearly. In order to subtract out the echoes, the brain has to create a model of the environment, and I think the awareness of what's around us is a byproduct.

Re:Give it a try!

[ndogg]

Thanks, now I have a big huge bruise on my head!

Re:Give it a try!

[blakestah]

Of course you did. Blind people use this all the time, it is referred to properly as the "obstacle sense".

At one time this amazed scientists - blind people could walk through a room without hitting objects. So, they covered their bodies in thick felt, and the blind still had their obstacle sense. Then, they filled their ears with wax, and the blind bumped into things.

Sighted people lack the obstacle sense, but can learn it in a few hours. No clicking or other extra noise generation is necessary.

Re:Give it a try!

[fireboy1919]

Not all seeing people are missing it. As a sound technician, this is a side-effect that I've noticed I got as I increased my audio awareness.

It's based mostly upon hearing the doppler effect from objects that are around us as circulating air hits things. Almost everyone can probably hear these sounds, but they're mostly low frequency and rather quiet, like whispers. The real trouble in doing it is picking the sounds out of all the other random sounds you hear. I've quite gotten used to having the sens

Re:Give it a try!

[TheMidget]

Ah, that's how Stevie Wonder drives around! But I wonder whether it still works after a couple of glasses of beer...

Re:Give it a try!

[blancolioni]

At one time this amazed scientists - blind people could walk through a room without hitting objects. So, they covered their bodies in thick felt, and the blind still had their obstacle sense. Then, they filled their ears with wax, and the blind bumped into things.

And then they published their results, in a brightly coloured book called "21 Fun Things to do with Blind People."

Re:Give it a try!

[blakestah]

Actually, I think you will find there are a large number of blind people who are very interested in how their perceptual capabilities are different, or especially enhanced, relative to sighted persons.

This all stems from a very long psychological literature on the capabilities of the blind, almost all of which find there to be only very small enhancements in their perception. The studies on the "obstacle sense" show the largest differences I am aware of.

Re:Give it a try!

[jafiwam]

Try this;

Play some ELO or other music with lots of high end sound.

Close your eyes.

Have a friend (or two works better) hold a cat on one side of your head at various distances. (The friend should move around on the other side to avoid you hearing the person moving.)

I bet you can tell where the cat is. They absorb a LOT of high frequency sound.

been done before?

[c4ffeine]

I heard about something on a TV show a few years ago. It talked about some guy who was training deaf people to "echolocate" using clicks. Supposedly, they were able to walk, tell the diff between walls and shrubs, and even skateboard. Does anyone know about this?

Re:been done before?

[saihung]

Assuming that the original poster means blind and not deaf people, I saw something similar on a cable news show several years ago. A man used clicks to echolocate his way around, and was even able to ride a bicycle. Pretty impressive, if it really works.

Re:been done before?

[Havokmon]

I heard about something on a TV show a few years ago. It talked about some guy who was training deaf people to "echolocate" using clicks. Supposedly, they were able to walk, tell the diff between walls and shrubs, and even skateboard. Does anyone know about this?

I remember it. I think it was on discovery channel. I don't remember skateboards, but they could actually ride bikes while useing a clicker they held in their mouths (IIRC).

Did not understand the article

[civilengineer]

Can someone explain to me what the article is trying to say? I know that we developed eyesight to see the world around us and bats developed ultrasonic sound and ears to percieve it. But, how is becoming "batman" going to help improve our situation?

Re:Did not understand the article

[Narphorium]

If you think of the human body as a computer. This would be equivalent to discovering a new port through which we can recieve additional information.
It means that we might be able to absorb more information faster and easier.

Re:Did not understand the article

[Lshmael]

from the original post

The researchers behind the project hope that a similar system in the cockpit of fighter planes could allow pilots to track some controls using their hearing, freeing up their eyes for other tasks."

See, you didn't even have to read the article!

Re:Did not understand the article

[lobsterGun]

Batman is a scientist.

So was Mr. Wizard.

[runlvl0]

Perfect Tommy: Emilio Lizardo. Wasn't he on TV once?
Buckaroo Banzai: You're thinking of Mr. Wizard.
Reno: Emilio Lizardo is a top scientist, dumbkopf.
Perfect Tommy: So was Mr. Wizard.

I've used bat calls before

[Anonymous Coward]

and they still havent helped me pick up the perfect who-likes-short-shorts bat woman.

Applications for the blind?

[ravind]

Maybe I missed something, but can't this be used to help the blind navigate around their homes or even outdoors? It's the first thing I would think of rather than fighter pilots.

Re:Applications for the blind?

[qbwiz]

It's [worldacces...eblind.org] been [sfasu.edu] done. [teambat.org]

Re:Applications for the blind?

[Lord_Dweomer]

" Maybe I missed something, but can't this be used to help the blind navigate around their homes or even outdoors? It's the first thing I would think of rather than fighter pilots."

Which is why you'll never get to be President.

Re:Applications for the blind?

[AndyChrist]

I tried this myself for a little while a few years ago. I'm sure with more practice it could be improved, but the best resolution I could get was about 6 feet. I could tell there was an object if it was about 6 feet across (good for walls, cars, stands of trees) and to within about 6 feet (if it was just a few multiples of that away). This in a few hours. I used a bottle cap to make my clicks. I suspect that tongue clicks would be less consistent (but on the other hand, would be more flexible)

I'd really like to see some independent confirmation of that Team Bat guy's claims, though. I've got doubts as to whether the guy could say, tell a curb was coming up while riding a bike, or avoid a signpost. Larger objects are easy to avoid. Riding a bike in starlight, you can hear mailboxes along the road better than you can see them. But some things, I'm skeptical.

Still, even if they can only detect larger objects, like buildings or fences, it would have to be a tremendous help in navigation for a blind person.

Re:Applications for the blind?

[ndogg]

Many blind people already use their hearing to navigate their environment. Many of them can hear many times better than the rest of us.

Re:Applications for the blind?

[Wirr]

Many of them can hear many times better than the rest of us

No they don't. No study I know of ever found that the blind hear better.
They just throw more processing power at hearing - and thus are able to interprete more of what they hear.

Re:Applications for the blind?

[mdielmann]

My 1GHz laptop works better than my 200 MHz desktop. Oh wait, that's just processing power...

'Better' can refer to the totality of the experience. If we both close our eyes, someone claps, and we both try to point at him, the blind guy will probably do a better job. His hearing is better, just maybe not better at collecting raw information.

Hmmm...

[Faust7]

but as a true bat aficionado, he is just happy to know what it is like to be a bat.

Someone ought to let Nagel [silcom.com] know.

A blind man does it already.

[haydon4]

I remember some 5 or 6 years ago I saw a story on some daytime talk show about people overcoming their disabilities; not that it's all that unusual, but one guest in particular who has been blind since birth, actually used echolocation to get around. He made regular clicking sounds with his tounge and he could navigate down a city street without any real assistance. It was actually quite amazing. Although, I don't know any blind fighter pilots but the principal is sound. Humans do have echolocation abilities, it would just take a long time time to develop any natural ability.

Additional anecdotal evidence

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

SF writer Arthur Clarke wrote an essay about the senses humans have and don't have. He reported seeing a blind man referee a table tennis game, successfully. Clarke also mention playing table tennis under a tin roof once. When it started raining, his game collapsed.

Apparently we're better than we know at pinpointing sharp sounds in the environment.

Re:A blind man does it already.

[Dark Lord Seth]

Although, I don't know any blind fighter pilots

I know a few brits who do, but they're on holidays in Iraq now...

Holy smoke!

[Pig Hogger]

Holy smoke! The penguin thinks he can escape us into that smokescreen! Quick, Robin, give me the bat-sonar-headphones!

George Lucas isn't a fool then

[Anonymous Coward]

What you hear in Star Wars isn't sound in space, it's echolocation technology.

Re:George Lucas isn't a fool then

[Peyna]

Of course, the alternative to bending reality in a space movie would be fight scenes in space with either complete silence, or just music and heavy breathing of the pilot. Take your pick.

Re:George Lucas isn't a fool then

[yerricde]

I've always imagined that audible explosions in space opera somehow relate to interference picked up on the pilots' radios.

AFAIK, already in development before w/Airforce

[naztafari]

Hey, good logical explanation for Star Wars sounds!

a similar system in the cockpit of fighter planes could allow pilots to track some controls using their hearing, freeing up their eyes for other tasks

The Airforce already has been developing this already, not with echolocation though. It was shown on discovery channel or something. Uses a more efficient system.

Aircraft uses sensors to measure position of other aircraft in the vicinity then onboard computer replicates positions in 3D audio space fed

Re:George Lucas isn't a fool then

[Zakabog]

Ummm even if this is a joke, echos are sounds bounced off of an object and back to your ears so you're saying "What you hear in Star Wars isn't sound in space, it's sound in space."

This would be nifty for cars...

[2nd Post!]

Though you'd have to neutralize for relatively high velocity, and map to a different signal entirely (probably radio), before converting into sound... Doppler would tell you relative speed, and you would need some sort of tracking system (headset/goggles + sensors?) to locate your ears...

see things, eh

[focitrixilous P]

So you mean all this time I've been getting banned from game servers for using mods to see everyone, it was a power all humans can develop?! Unfair!

Recording Microscopic Life

[Basehart]

David Dunn's Angels and Insects [earthear.com], although not a study of audio based VR (or even featuring bat sounds for that matter), is a great place to get started listening to microscopic sounds.

Here's an MP3 [earthear.com] of some insects in Africa getting it on.

If you think this stuff sounds like fun you might want to do what I did a few years ago and pick up a high quality microphone with a big diaphragm, such as an AKG C414, and get out into the woods at night and make some recordings. You'll be surprised what's out there when you start filtering out the sounds humans make and crank the volume!!

Cool...

[c0dedude]

I imagine that with time and practice, the echolocation could become intuitive at greater complexities. The brain has a good capacity to adapt to tasks, it would be interesting to see how it adapts to a new sense. Anyway, I definitly want one.

Cool...

[cybermace5]

I bet I could get a blind-deaf person to navigate using only taste! Strap two solar cells to their forehead and run the wires to opposite sides of their tongue! Hey, it's only 1-pixel stereo vision, but better than nothing.

Re:Cool...

[qbwiz]

Surprisingly this, too, has been done [discover.com] , albeit in a slightly more complex form.

Re:Cool...

[cybermace5]

Great article. So the brain can map sensors and functions to other areas, translating one form of stimulus into another....

The brain is a giant, biological, reconfigurable logic device. Essentially it's a 100 billion gate FPGA.

Cool.

Re:Cool...

[slamb]

That's a really cool article. I have a bit of skepticism for one part of it, though: the woman with no sense of balance. The summary: she lost her sense of balance because an antibiotic killed the hairs lining her inner ear. She couldn't walk. When she strapped this thing on to her tongue (essentially an array of electrodes connected to an accelerometer), she could. But then:

Schiltz later took the experiment even further. After 20 minutes spent centering the circle, she took off the hat, pulled out the

Didn't 3D audio in games tell us this?

[Anonymous Coward]

WWAAAAY back in quake2 I could track exactly where my opponents were on a map, as long as I was wearing headphones. The headphones were necessary to get the stereoimaging right, as speakers can be a bit difficult to set up. So how is this at all suprising?

Re:Didn't 3D audio in games tell us this?

[aXis100]

In computer games, especially quake 2, stereo sounds are represented by varying the volume of the sound in each speaker.

With echolocation, the received sound waves have very slight timing/phase differences due to the orientation of our head. Processing this requires significantly more skill, but use this all the time to locate the general direction of a noise source.

The new part about this finding is that we've never used it to provide accurate imaging before.

What it is like to be a bat

[zerocircle]

For as long as I can remember, I've been able to echolocate people moving around me while I'm near a CRT -- especially when I'm sitting at a computer. I can...shall we say, "feel" the movements of people behind me. (It's a spatial sense. Not sure how else to describe it.) It's not as if I can tell what they're doing with their hands or anything detailed like that (you know, dodging projectiles and such), but I'm aware of their general position.

So now, of course, my primary machine has an LCD. No more echolocation. (Luckily, it's a laptop, so I can keep my back to the wall.) I don't have the 15.7 KHz whine of an electron tube to bounce off things around me. Ye gods, that infernal CRT whine...most people can't hear it, but it drives me bats.

Oh dear. In all honesty, I wasn't trying to pun.

echolocation = soundhax

[Anonymous Coward]

just make sure you don't get accused of wallhacking and then banned from life...

Augmented Reality?

[Lord_Dweomer]

I'm really interested in how these sorts of discoveries will be implemented when Augmented Reality becomes more mainstream with wearable computing. It would be fascinating to have a HUD that visualized echolocation in the form of showing soundwaves and their locations etc. Obviously it'd have to be tweaked so as not to overload your senses, but it could be a very cool thing to view. Finally I would be able to see the same thing all those kids who use acid see.

Re:Augmented Reality?

[Lord_Dweomer]

Yes, I understand that, but as far as I know, there is no mainstream device that lets you slip on glasses and view soundwaves as they are emitted or rebounding from objects. Just because the whole point of THIS thing is to not have a HUD, doesn't mean that it couldn't be even more useful with a HUD. Yes one application could be to have less visual clutter, at the loss of the accuracy that comes with having a visual aid, but another application could be to pair echolocation with a visualization of the echo

Holy human hacking Batman!

[pavon]

Damn, this is the coolest thing I've read in a long time! Imagine having a second set of low grade eye that worked in the dark. You could do all sorts of cool things with it, like effectively having a set of eyes on the back of your head.

The article mentions one potential application being that you could look at dials and switces without taking your eyes off what you were doing. However, would shifting your attention to echo location be as bad as looking away would? Think cell phones. It's kind of like chameleons - they can point their eyes in different directions, but can they concentrate on both of them at the same time? Could humans gain the ability to concentrate on more than one sensory input at a time? Probably not, but the input would still be there and would catch our attention anytime something notable happened. Like when we see something out of the corner of our eye, or hear our name in a crowd. Cognetics is so cool.

It also talked about how bats adjust the frequency of the waves sent out, as the distance to the object changes. I imagine for a bat this would be as automatic as focusing our eyes is to us. We would have to do this manualy, like focusing a camera. Oh, but what if we interfaced the brain or some nerves and trained the mind to do the focusing!

I've always thought that if I were to loose a limb in an accident I would be pounding down doors at universities acrossed the country to find one willing to attempt to use the nerves once controlling my limb to instead control a keyboard/mouse type interface (which would comunicate to the PC via bluetooth eventually). But this is even cooler, and I imagine provided a little information from Dean waters on this, you could build something like this on your own. Hot damn, I have a new project!

Re:Holy human hacking Batman!

[mdielmann]

I've always thought that if I were to loose a limb in an accident...Hot damn, I have a new project!

First step, cut off arm...

Threat warning

[RealUlli]

Actually, probably a rather good idea, IMHO. Imagine a surround sound system telling the pilot the direction of a threat, encoding type and distance into frequency and volume of the sound.

Or imagine a radar system encoding direction, distance and speed of a target into some surround sound system...

To me, especially the threat warning system looks interesting, because you can hear something even if it's behind you, while your eyes only see stuff in front of you. Imagine, the advantage if you can hear at once that that radar site that just started chirping seems to be in the direction of the depression in the ridge you just passed so you can do something about it, or the fighter radar that just started chirping is at your 6 o'clock - that guy is in a bad position... wait, now he's switched from search to attack mode - now you're in trouble... ;-]

Or if you could hear the drone of your wingman - you'd definitely hear if he gets out of position...

Cheers, Ulli

Stereolocation

[sakusha]

As anyone with bad hearing in one ear (like me) will attest, stereo location using sound is a very weak sense. Having worked with stereoscopic 3D images for many years, I have found that about 10-20% of all people have vision problems in one eye that are just bad enough that they can't see the stereographic effect. I expect that similarly, there are enough people with weak hearing in one ear, enough to prevent a similarly large group from using audio stereolocation.

Re:Stereolocation

[357_Magnum]

Well I have uni-lateral hearing, which means that I can't hear anything at all in one ear. So I can attest to not having the ability to use hearing to pinpoint locations. If someone calls my name in a large area, it will take me a long time to find the person. Most of the time I can get by simply by making sure I move my head around to ensure that I can hear things around me, which has actually made me more sensitive to lots of sounds since I have to constantly listen. Things like the telephone and headphon

Re:Stereolocation

[Wirr]

You could try blinding yourself - according to this [discover.com] then you would be able to locate sound with just one ear.

Then again, that may be a bit high a price to achieve sound location abilities.

Unfortunately

[Boyceterous]

this probably only works if there is only one "clicker" in the area. Otherwise you'd get your echoes confused with the others, with embarassing results. Also, there must be some relatively low velocity limit, since your interpretation of the echo likely depends on (your knowledge of) the origination point of the audio source. I bet parking meters and telephone poles are quite stealthy against this technology. Rather than trying to navigate yourself down a straight hallway alone, try blindfolding a bunch of people and get them to echolocate around a circle - better than twister!

No clicking required!

[Jetson]

this probably only works if there is only one "clicker" in the area. Otherwise you'd get your echoes confused with the others, with embarassing results.

Not really. You're thinking in terms of radar, where azimuth and range are determined by matching a single ping with a single pong. In such systems, multiple sources or multiple path replies are a source of confusion since they add too much information to the process. If you're trying to paint a sonic landscape, however, you don't want to try and associate a single ping and pong since that would only identify the range to a single reflector in one small portion of your area of interest. Instead, you want to receive as much information about the environment as possible from each ping. Having someone/something else making the ping isn't a problem as long as they don't overwhelm the replies.

As an experiment, try sitting in a place with a fair amount of white noise (such as CPU fans). Now slowly bring your right hand toward your ear with your palm open. The first thing you'll notice is a loss of some higher frequency ambient sounds from the right side. As the hand gets closer, you may notice an increase in reflected noises that originated on your left. Eventually you will be able to judge the distance between your ear and your palm simply by the tone of the noise.

Echolocation

[Kumochisonan]

The researchers behind the project hope that a similar system in the cockpit of fighter planes could allow pilots to track some controls using their hearing, freeing up their eyes for other tasks.

Modern Science, innovating new ways of killing our fellow man more effectively!

I also saw something on using echolocation with blind people a while back, according to the story, it doesn't take long for users to adapt. Saying that, Blind people have very sensitive hearing anyway.

Used in Babylon 5

[Mick D.]

This was actually used in the show Babylon 5. If I am remembering the posts online by the exec. producer and main writer, JMS, he said that they wanted to use sound effects for space battles but also wanted to be accurate to the reality of space where there shouldn't be any sound.

So the technique they used was to describe the sound effects as assistive to the pilots like full surround sound in video games to give a viceral sense the position of the other things around. They maybe explained that a total of once of twice on the series itself, but the idea stuck with me as a very good idea even in the relatively normal environment of todays fighter jets or even for situational awareness in cars on the highway.

Oh, take the walkman off!

[tjstork]

I'm sorry officer I was trying to drive by echolocation but I forgot to take the headphones off...

Re:Oh, take the walkman off!

[Zakabog]

Why would you be wearing a walkman in a car? I've never seen a car that had absolutely no stereo. Even if you have a car that's total crap and no money for a stereo, you can find a junkyard and buy one for the price of the walkman (and you should have some amount of money if you can pay for the gas in your car and buy a walkman)

LOL

[tjstork]

You would wear a walkman in the car if you wanted to get the best stereo experience, and, to avoid the sounds of things like sirens and other cars!

For prior art...

[Idarubicin]

...see also here [daredevil-movies.com].

Mmmm... echolocation

[softspokenrevolution]

What sorts of systems could this be used for in a fighter plane. I could guess as some sort of range finder or other indicator, but I would imagine that the utility would be limited to something of that nature, plus it would probably require some sort of crazy surround sound headset.

The Acoustic Orientation of Bats and Men

[Anonymous Coward]

How can bats flying blindly detect 1/100 inch wires from several feet away, dodge stalactites in pitch-dark caves, catch insects on the wing or fish in motion just below the surface of the water, and find their way back to their home roost? In this remarkable book, a pioneering scientist in the areas of neurobiology and behavior explains in layperson's language just how bats can "see" with their ears.

Quoted from Amazon [amazon.com]

Echolocation for Dummies

[Mulletproof]

"The report says that it is a 'very intuitive process.' The researchers behind the project hope that a similar system in the cockpit of fighter planes could allow pilots to track some controls using their hearing..."

Oooooooh, I see.... More intuitive than the low altitude voice warning, low fuel voice warning, radar illumination tones, missile lock tones, etc, etc, etc....

New Scientist Is Lame Again

[Mooncaller]

This is nothing new. Most of the techniques, talked about, have been used with RADAR for decades. The thing that bats do, is interpret the sonic wavefront. This is accomplished by the structure of the head and ears. They produce subtle phase shifting depending on the direction the waves are coming from. Humans do this also, but not nearly to the degree that bats do it. Its the bats need to manipulate wavefronts that has caused the evolution of the many spectacular head shapes. If a model of one of the simpler bats ( i.e. not a Mexican Freetail) is made that duplicates the affect that a bat has on its call, and place microphones were the eardrums are, a human would still need a lot of training to learn how to interpret the signals. Bats probably have a hardware solution to do some of this interpratation ( just like humans have a partialy hardware solution to the problem of parsing speach phonems). The only cool "bat" thing, the artical talks about, is the dynamic nature of the sound generation. Bats are in effect using sound like hands, to feel. But this is not unique to bats. The gymnatoid eels do something simular with electric signals. They also use the chirp modulation thing. I noticed that the artical does have a link to Waters website. I guess that counters some of the lameness.

Virtual insects?!

[slittle]

I kill (and even headshot) people through boxes, doors, etc. in Counterstrike all the time, just by listening to them move around. Naturally I get accused of wallhacking.. it looks the same (and technically, probably is - CS doesn't seem to take walls into accound with audio).

I can follow the guy through the wall using sound, and open fire just before he emerges from the arch.. I don't need to see him appear, I know he will be there, so I fire regardless and get the kill before he can react.

Used it all my life...

[decipher_saint]

...well, for sports at any rate.

Now, first things first, I'm not totally blind but I am legally blind. I have Achromatopsia [achromat.org], so I don't see a whole heck of a lot outside yet I can still play soccer, baseball, basketball (especially), Disc Golf and Ultimate Frisbee because I can hear what's going on around me at all times. I don't have to see where my disc lands I listen for the "thunk", with soccer and baseball there have been "beeper" balls for a long time and in basketball there are always sounds to let you know where the ball is (dribbling, passing, team mates, etc).

Now, this technology couldn't be used en masse as another post pointed out because there would be too much interferance from others and using headphones would block out other important sounds like traffic and other pedestrians.

Anywho, my $0.02

BINCAS

[Thagg]

There were a series of article written back in the early 80's in Sport Aviation, the house organ of the Experimental Aviation Association, about a radar system for light planes that worked in a similar way. The guy had built extremely cheap, short range (two miles, say) radars out of coffee cans. He mounted two of them in an airplane, pointed 45 degrees to the left and right of the centerline, and rigged stereo headphones to them. The idea would be that you could hear other traffic in the air, and then locate them with your eyes to see and avoid them.

It's surprisingly hard to pick up light planes visually, they are tiny specks right up until the time that they fill the windshield. The response of the FAA has been the TCAS systems -- which are extremely complex and eyewateringly expensive (about $1M per system) This makes sense for jetliners, but is out of the question for light planes.

As near as I can tell, nobody did anything with the BINCAS system after the articles came out. It was a cool idea, though.

thad

Great

[jasonditz]

So we don't need eyes for seeing anymore, freeing them up to be used for their other many useful functions.

Gamers are smarter than these idiots.

[TyrranzzX]

People wearing headphones could easily hunt down a 'virtual insect'

I bet these people wonder how they can tell from which direction sounds comes from when someone is talking to them. Seriously, replace "virtual insect" with "other guy on the enemy team in ravenshield" and these people are found to be completly clueless.

Hell, even the part about fighter piolets using more than their eyes is rather old; I'm in a tribes2 clan and I remember awhile back we had installed a soundpack that modified the Beow

Echolocation for Humans?

[floydigus]

Sure! I used to use it all the time but now I have Slashdot for finding virgins.

Vlad T. Impaler
Count of Dracula.

"Can this be modded down too?"

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, no problem.