The vOICe

One of the earliest and most widely studied visual-to-auditory sensory substitution devices, developed by Peter Meijer in 1992. The vOICe converts camera images into sound by scanning left to right, mapping horizontal position to time, vertical position to audio frequency (higher positions produce higher pitches), and brightness to loudness. The name contains "Oh I See" as an acronym. Originally requiring specialized hardware, The vOICe is now available as smartphone software. Research with the system has contributed significantly to understanding how the brain processes cross-modal sensory information.