outin
A glass wall with a glass door
vOICe
Some leaves
leaves
The front of my house with lights
fronthouse
Functional recruitment of visual cortex for sound encoded object
See the abstract of this study. If I understand things correctly, a late blind subject was subjected to TMS such that the areas related to vision were made temporarily inoperative. This user was unable to use the vOICe thereby indicating that the vOICe’s approach to sensory substitution is closly mapped to vision.
Controlling the vOICe remotely without changing focus from the current application
I have created a utility to remote control the vOICe
The program is open source and you can get it at the following link.
vOICeCmd
I am including the program’s manual below.
Introduction
vOICeCmd is a utility that allows remote control of the The vOICe from the commandline. The vOICe uses windows messages as a remote control mechanism. This approach though easy-to-use cannot be used by the average user primarily because it involves a lot of programming. This utility is a wrapper around that functionality. The entire interface of the vOICe can be accessed using simple to use commandline commands.
Usage
All that you need to do to use this interface is to ensure that the vOICe is running. Once that is the case, you can pass one command at a time to the vOICe. For example, to increase the frame rate by four times, you would issue the command:
vOICeCmd Speed*4
similarly, to mute the vOICe, you would issue the command
vOICeCmd Mute
Installation
no special installation is required. Copy the vOICeCmd executable to the folder where the vOICe executable resides.
Notes
- Only one command at a time can be specified on the commandline using vOICeCmd. This is deliberate. It is easy to implement the passing of multiple commands. However, in my experience, the user needs some time to assimilate any change that takes place in the output of the vOICe. So, as of now, I have decided to stick to the single command approach.
- It is also important that the vOICe is started manually. I have decided not to start the vOICe from vOICeCmd. This is because I have no easy way of telling whether the user has enough permissions to run the vOICe.
Batch file error codes
If executing vOICeCmd from a batch file, you can use the errorlevel construct to trap the results from vOICeCmd.
| Error code | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 0 | normal exit |
| 1 | an invalid command was specified |
| 2 | no command was specified on the commandline |
| 3 | the vOICe is not running |
Credits
This programme would not have been possible without the sample code an easy to follow instructions provided on the seeing with sound website by Doctor Peter BL Meijer
I would also like to thank members of the program-l list
in particular, Mark Long for helping me with my Visual C++ questions.
Contacting me
You can contact me through the seeing with sound mailing list or through this blog.
= Links of interest =
Direct link to the page about remote controling the vOICe including a list of commands
image of a mexican sizzler
Safeguarding my money using the vOICe
My bank, <a href=”http://www.hdfcbank.com”>HDFC bank<a> recently implemented some aditional security measures as part of a secure banking innitiative. These measures involve asking the user a number of questions before innitiating transactions such as a third party funds transfer. Also, as a measure to prevent phishing attacks, the bank has asked the customer to select an image and a custom text message which is displayed at the time the customer enters the password. The idea presumably is that if the site has been attacked, the image displayed and or the text message displayed will be altered. I have no problem in verifying the text message but what do I do about the image? This is where the <a href=”http://www.seeingwithsound.com”>vOICe</a> came in.
HDFC’s implementation of this feature is very sensible. The image has an alt tag though it is not too meaningful. I was able to right click on the image and download it. Now, whenever I login, I have that master image. All I do is download the currently displayed image and then use the change detection feature to compare the new image with the master image. The change detection feature sounds the differences between 2 images. In this case, I hear silence if the images are the same.