A new pair of glasses may be all that is needed to help the blind see in the near future after the invention of a miraculous device that turns images into sound, according to the Daily Mail.
The vOICe is a pair of glasses connected to a small computer, which scans from left to right, turning real world images into specific sounds.
The glasses are designed to help the blind make their own sense of the world around them.
One study, entitled "Auditory Sensory Substitution is Intuitive and Automatic with Texture Stimuli," helped make the glasses a reality, delving into the specifics of how sound is connected with other senses. It was published by Caltech Coda and lead by Shinsuke Shimojo, professor of experimental psychology at Gertrude Baltimore.
"Many neuroscience textbooks really only devote a few pages to multisensory interaction," said Shimojo. "But 99 percent of our daily life depends on multisensory, also called multimodal processing."
What he means is that when we utilize listening, for example, we can often connect other senses to what we hear. An example he used was that of a phone call where you could hear a close friend crying. Just from hearing their shaky voice, you could also probably picture them in tears and what their face would look like sad.
"This is an example of the way sensory causality is not unidirectional — vision can influence sound, and sound can influence vision," added Shimojo.
