See this lonely rusty bicycle. It is imbedded in a lot of plants. The trick here was to focus on the bicycle and not only on the plants that are growing through it.
I had to concentrate to find the bicycle.
A rusty bicycle
vOICe
Ripples
This photograph has been taken close to sunset. The idea is to catch the ripples on the water. I was above on a jetty. This is a classic illustration of being able to capture something using vision and not touch. I could have touched the water but I would have got whet and I could not have recorded my experience in a form that could have been easily conveyed.
Negative video may help in detecting the ripples better. They are quite small in the soundscape. Watch for the higher pitched entries.
Ripples
A beach scene
The Royal Village
This is an image and soundscape of the royal village hotel in Goa. There are plants, and parts of the building.
Royalvillage
Using a pin hole camera with the vOICe
I recently attended a workshop on alternative photography in Goa conducted by the center for alternative photography. A friend and I were the only blind participants in the workshop. The workshop is meant for sighted people. The workshop trained us to use pinhole cameras as opposed to digital cameras. Therefore, we were back to technology that was used probably in the previous century. You had no eyepiece, no flash no autofocus and no zoom. The cameras were cardboard boxes and we were using something called photo paper.
We also used cameras made out of matchboxes. They consisted of a matchbox that had a hole for the aperture. The inner tray of the matchbox had been hollowed out. There was one loaded canister of film on the left and an empty canister of film on the right. The canisters had roles of paper protruding from them. These were joined such that as you turn the filled canister, part of the film would roll onto the empty canister. There was a small piece of cardboard which I could move up and down to block and unblock the aperture.
The vOICe came in extremely handy. I was able to see what I was trying to photograph. So, I would first see what I was going to photograph using my mobile phone, then, pick up the camera, and do the needful. The trick of course was that I had to get the camera in the same position. Also, moving that piece of cardboard was a challenge but that was more because of my partially formed left palm than anything else. My instructors were extremely interested in the vOICe and, I took a good many digital shots. I have the same shots captured by the pinhole cameras. My subsequent posts will contain some of these pictures. The pinhole versions will be uploaded later.
I also had a chance to do developing in a dark room. I was wearing the video glasses at that time. There is light that emanates from these glasses so they cannot be used in a dark room.
Another Select City Walk experience
I took the vOICe out to the shopping mall (The Select City Walk) once again. This time, I made two changes to the configuration of my netbook. I set the power scheme to maximum performance and I used a program switch speed for windows xp to set it to maximize the performance of the netbook’s CPU. I made these changes after a discussion with Peter as a test. What was happening was that the vOICe would stop giving me input. It almost seemed to hang. Mind you, my netbook is an Asus eee pc with 512MB of ram running Windows XP pro sp2. The problem remains as in there are times when the vOICe stops giving me any output or, sometimes when it is giving me output and I try to access it’s menus, I cannot do so. Jaws v9 works ok but the vOICe seems to slow down.
However, the maximizing of the CPU’s usage helped though the battery was exhausted after about 2 hours.
1. I found it easier to distinguish doorways.
2. The tiles on the wall were clearly visible.
3. I could tell when we were looking at columns and pillars.
4. I had an aha moment when I saw a rectangular speaker. The rectangle was like the one in exercise mode. The same applies to circular speakers that were mounted on shelves.
5. I had a look at a lot of curios and other items including toy cars. The toy cars soundscapes reminded nme of what I used to see when using the vOICe on the road. This was logical.
6. We went to a restaurant and there was a buffet lunch. I tried looking at different food items but they all seemed to look the same.
7. I found a strange glass that had a short stem and a large bowl like structure where the water was filled. Think of it like a vine glass with a short stem and a very large glass. I sensed it as a flattish circle more like a bowl so I was unable to find it visually until my dad explained the shape of the glass to me.
8. looking at people was interesting. They often blocked the light and are quite squishy.
Pranav
A shopping mall experience
I went to one of the shopping malls here with the vOICe. Security did not bother me but then I would not read too much into that since a lot of the guards are poorly trained. I was able to distinguish a wall of the parking lot from other things such as cars and assorted motorbikes while looking out of the left side passenger window of my car. Once I was inside the mall, the first thing that hit me was the sporadic rendering of images. I initially thought it was the netbook and glasses but dismissed that theory since the equipment had been running without errors on route to the mall. It seems that many lights in the mall are not switched on so there are patches of light and shadow. The camera is a pinhole camera and this makes a huge difference in how much light the camera can handle. So, most of the items on the shelves were lit by spot lights so they came out ok but the isles between the shelves and the corridor containing shops on either side were a different story.
I had grand plans of trying to identify the shop boundaries but this does not seem to be possible due to the lack of light. For anyone navigating in this mall, you need to keep close to the shops since they are better lit. The escalators were badly lit so I could not make much out. Still, an interesting exercise would be to stand on an escalator and use perspective to anticipate when you will reach the next floor. This did not work again due to the lack of light.
People also looked less curved and since I was getting less visual information, I had some trouble with perspective.
I had a look at shelves filled with different kinds of bottles. Shelves with packets sound different but you need to watch out for shelf boundaries. They can be quite useful in demarking one set of items from another. I tried looking into a freezer that had cold cuts etc but no go since that freezer did not have much light.
I then had a look at some clothes. It is easy to distinguish trousers that are hung on shelves from shirts that have also been hung on shelves. Sometimes though garments are stacked on shelves which complicate things since all that one really senses are the shelf boundaries with some patterns of clothing. Mind you while at the juice bar, I looked into a counter containing a number of juicers. They had the same rhythm as that of the trousers that I had seen earlier.
I was able to identify the opening of the door into a trial room. I tried tracking when the trial room door opened and closed but I did not have too much success with this since I had to keep moving due to the number of people in that shop. Plus, keeping my head still at a fixed location with a boring door to look at became cumbersome.
I had to set the vOICe to double speed otherwise; it was not as responsive to scene changes as I needed it to be. I made no other changes from the default configuration.