In 1998, Paul Querelle , then a student at Anglia Polytechnic University in Cambridge England, started working with Camsight , involving a local support group and a number of blind or partially sighted local volunteers, to further research in this field. In June 1998, I learned about the work of Harry Reid. Harry Reid has invented a portable system which he calls the Sonic Eye, and he has written a very nice document describing his system. That document is now available for download as a zipped MS Word file harreed.zip , provided here with his permission. It includes several excellent illustrations clarifying the image to sound mapping concepts that turn out to be basically the same for The vOICe and the Sonic Eye.
Time is a vertical line moving at a constant speed from left to right.
Thus a voice print can convert any sound into an image. The sonic eye does the reverse to convert images into sound. Since Autumn 1997, ThalesScope Limited has started beta testing a device called the ThalesScope , which is supposed to convert sight into sound. Other than this, little factual data is available about it at the time of this writing, and it is also unclear where it would differ from existing The vOICe technology. ThalesScope Limited is headed by Isaiah W. Cox, and owned in part by Thales Resources, and in part by Tom Karnes.