Better than Real at Lightwave

I went to Beau lotto's presentation "Better than Real" yesterday at the Lightwave Exhibition at the Science Gallery.

It was interesting...to a degree. In a nutshell, Dr. Lotto discussed how human's perceive colour, and how perception is dependent, on context and, our brain's historical experience making meaning out of present context. lottolab's latest work is based on the notion of sensory substitution - replacing one sense with another. The example provided is how blind people can perceive their world through their ears, i.e. hearing your visual world. Beau provides the example from nature of how Dolphin's use sonar for navigation.

A thought that came to mind was that I'd come across previous work in this area. The work at vOICe, "Vision technology for the totally blind" is a fascinating project and well worth a read. Also, the book "The Blind Watchmaker" by Richard Dawkins has some extremely interesting writings on the evolution of bats and 'echolocation'.