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A blog dealing with sensory substitution and other esoteric concepts and technologies like speech-recognition and chaos theory

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select city walk

A painting experience

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I was at the select City Walk with a friend and decided to try painting a cup. The outfit provides clay cups and other items and you can paint them in whatever colors you want. The items are then glazed therefore you need to wait 10 days before you get your painted item. In our case, we decided to paint a cup. Our strokes had to be uniform and the quantity of water in the paint had to be controlled. I had a look with the phone version of the vOICe while we were painting. It was impossible to tell the difference in colors and I did not expect the vOICe to give me that information since the soundscapes do not encode color. However, I was abe to tell when the color was not uniform since I was able to sense the sploches of paint on the cup.

Painting the inside was tricky. I suspect I need a powerful light to look inside and then monitor things closely with the vOICe. I tried moving the brush in random patterns inside and thought I had covered the base. That was not the case. My friend had to step in and help.

Another Select City Walk experience

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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