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Exploring Visual-To-Auditory Sensory Substitution Mappings in An RESEARCH ARTICLE Stereosonic vision: Exploring visual-to- auditory sensory substitution mappings in an immersive virtual reality navigation paradigm Daniela Massiceti1*, Stephen Lloyd Hicks2, Joram Jacob van Rheede3 1 Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom, 2 Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom, 3 Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom a1111111111 * [email protected] a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 Abstract Sighted people predominantly use vision to navigate spaces, and sight loss has negative consequences for independent navigation and mobility. The recent proliferation of devices that can extract 3D spatial information from visual scenes opens up the possibility of using OPEN ACCESS such mobility-relevant information to assist blind and visually impaired people by presenting Citation: Massiceti D, Hicks SL, van Rheede JJ this information through modalities other than vision. In this work, we present two new meth- (2018) Stereosonic vision: Exploring visual-to- ods for encoding visual scenes using spatial audio: simulated echolocation and distance- auditory sensory substitution mappings in an dependent hum volume modulation. We implemented both methods in a virtual reality (VR) immersive virtual reality navigation paradigm. PLoS ONE 13(7): e0199389. https://doi.org/ environment and tested them using a 3D motion-tracking device. This allowed participants 10.1371/journal.pone.0199389 to physically walk through virtual mobility scenarios, generating data on real locomotion Editor: Krish Sathian, Pennsylvania State behaviour. Blindfolded sighted participants completed two tasks: maze navigation and University, UNITED STATES obstacle avoidance. Results were measured against a visual baseline in which participants Received: November 6, 2017 performed the same two tasks without blindfolds. Task completion time, speed and number of collisions were used as indicators of successful navigation, with additional metrics explor- Accepted: June 6, 2018 ing detailed dynamics of performance. In both tasks, participants were able to navigate Published: July 5, 2018 using only audio information after minimal instruction. While participants were 65% slower Copyright: © 2018 Massiceti et al. This is an open using audio compared to the visual baseline, they reduced their audio navigation time by an access article distributed under the terms of the average 21% over just 6 trials. Hum volume modulation proved over 20% faster than simu- Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and lated echolocation in both mobility scenarios, and participants also showed the greatest reproduction in any medium, provided the original improvement with this sonification method. Nevertheless, we do speculate that simulated author and source are credited. echolocation remains worth exploring as it provides more spatial detail and could therefore Data Availability Statement: All data files are be more useful in more complex environments. The fact that participants were intuitively made available for public download at http://www. able to successfully navigate space with two new visual-to-audio mappings for conveying robots.ox.ac.uk/~daniela/research/stereosonic_ vision/static/stereosonic_vision_data.zip. spatial information motivates the further exploration of these and other mappings with the goal of assisting blind and visually impaired individuals with independent mobility. Funding: Daniela Massiceti was supported by University of Oxford Clarendon Fund (http://www. ox.ac.uk/clarendon/about). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Stephen Hicks and Joram van Rheede: Salary and research expenses were supported by a PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0199389 July 5, 2018 1 / 32 Stereosonic vision: Visual-to-auditory sensory substitution for immersive virtual reality navigation private donor into the University of Oxford titled 1 Introduction ªEVE: Expanded Visual Enhancement.º The donor, Mr Jiangong Zhang, had no role in study design, Globally more than 250 million people are visually impaired, with over 35 million of this data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or group classified as blind [1, 2]. While certain causes of visual impairment can be prevented or preparation of the manuscript. treated, a large proportion of sight loss remains without a cure [3]. New treatment approaches Competing interests: The authors have declared such as retinal prosthetics, optogenetics, and gene therapy offer hope for the future, but at that no competing interests exist. present are at a research or early implementation stage and await evidence of real-life benefit to patients [4]. Vision loss affects the ability to independently carry out activities of daily living [5±8], in part due to its negative impact on mobility and navigation [9±15]. While blind or visually impaired individuals are often able to learn to successfully navigate without vision through ori- entation and mobility training [16], they face significant challenges not faced by the sighted population [17±20]. Non-sighted navigation requires more planning and cognitive resources [19±22], and blind and visually impaired individuals are at an increased risk of mobility- related accidents, injuries, and falls [23±27]. Even when walking around a familiar environ- ment, the variable presence of obstacles, changes in walking surface or drop-offs can be a sig- nificant perceived mobility hazard [28], and even very experienced non-sighted navigators still regularly veer off their intended course [29]. It also remains the case that human living spaces are usually designed with sighted navigation in mind [19]. While academic debate exists around the representation of spatial information in blind individuals, in particular people who are congenitally blind, it is clear that the cognitive ability for representing spatial information is not the main limiting factor in navigation and mobility [20, 30]. Rather, the limitation lies in the rate at which non-sighted navigators are able to acquire spatial information about their current environment, whether that is in order to build an initial cognitive map of the space, or to update their current position in a cognitive map from memory and scan for the presence of any obstacles to safe mobility [20]. While vision is uniquely well-placed to rapidly provide mobility-relevant spatial information [31], it is not the only source of such information. Already, many blind individuals will spontaneously learn to use non-visual cues to their advantage in sensing obstacles in their environment [32, 33]. Sensory Substitution Devices (SSDs) go one step further, converting information normally acquired through one sensory modality into a representation that is compatible with another intact sensory modality, aiming to exploit the increasingly well-understood cross-modal capacities of the brain [34, 35]. Approaches to substituting information received through vision naturally focus on the other spatially informative senses, namely hearing and touch [36]. The first SSDs were pioneered by Bach-y-Rita in the 1960s with his development of the Tactile Vision Sensory Substitution (TVSS) device [37]: subjects received vibrating patterns via an array of pins mounted on their backs and were able to differentiate between oriented parallel lines, simple geometric shapes and capital block letters. Extending this initial work, a host of studies have investigated ªseeingº with vibro-tactile and electro-tactile stimulation applied to a number of body surfaces [38±41]. Other SSDs have attempted to present an audi- tory representation of the visual scene. The vOICe, perhaps the most widely investigated vision-to-audio SSD, scans the visual environment from left to right, and converts the 2D gray- scale image into a frequency spectrum or ªsoundscapeº [42]. These efforts and others like Eye- Music [43] have largely focused on converting a 2D camera image into a corresponding sound or set of sounds for the purpose of identifying elements of the visual scene. Mobility, however, is a 3D task, and requires access to information about the distance of objects in the visual scene and their radial position. An effective SSD for navigation and mobil- ity will therefore need to provide such information as explicitly as possible. This moves away from the concept of an SSD as a generic replacement for vision, and towards seeing it as a PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0199389 July 5, 2018 2 / 32 Stereosonic vision: Visual-to-auditory sensory substitution for immersive virtual reality navigation mobility tool aimed at providing the user with an improved spatial awareness of their sur- roundings. This task-specific approach has the additional advantage of reducing the band- width of the information needed to be encoded cross-modallyÐan important consideration [36, 44]. Several SSDs have been developed specifically with this in mind (for detailed surveys of such devices, see [36, 44, 45]). Work in this field has initially been led by Leslie Kay with the initial Kay Sonic Torch [46] followed by several others [47±51]. While the first approaches only provided users with a `virtually extended' cane that reported the distances of objects fur- ther afield in their path, the more ambitious devices use
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