SLOAS: hearing with the eyes

In this paper a sensorial substitution system (SLOAS) is presented with the objective of helping deaf people. The system who is made of a microphoned glasses and a special kind of visualization system captures the environment acoustic information and encode it into visual elements, in order to have a graphic representation showed to the user though an eyesglasses-mounted display. All the process is made in real-time. The eyesglasses-mounted display has a see-through optics that show in a graphic way the information provided by the system but this information doesn't hide the normal vision space of the user. In the body of the glasses a small microphones are placed. These microphones capture the sound information that the deaf user can't hear. The signal of the microphones is the input of a system who calculates the main parameters of the sound wave. The parameters are the special localization of each sound source, the power of the sound and their spectral composition. This acustic information is converted in a visual information. This system is being tested by five deaf users, and now their opinion is being analyzed.