Minimal Tactile Vision Sensory Substitution (TVSS) System
Inspired by the pioneering work of Paul Bach-y-Rita, this prototype explores the minimal conditions under which vibration can usefully guide behaviour. Participants are blind folded and wear a head-mounted camera whose image is converted into patterns of stimulation in a vibrotactile array worn on their abdomen. Bach-y-Rita used hundreds of points of stimulation in his experiments, however we initially used six and found that this was sufficient for a simple ball tracking task.