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Matthias Schmidmaier
Sensory Substitution Systems
In Media Informatics Advanced Seminar on Multimodal Human-Computer Interaction, 2010 / 2011

Sensory substitution enables the experience of one sense through another one, mostly by using input from artificial modalities. Since the 1960's, sensory substitution devices have been developed to compensate sensory impairments, for example by 'seeing with the tongue'. Thereby sensory substitution studies have provided insight into the functionality and the abilities of the human brain. Above all during the past years, the technological progress enabled interesting new and further developments that in some cases already are suitable for daily use. In addition, sensory substitution technologies have also been used for sensory augmentation. This paper presents several current applications in the fields of accessibility and sensory augmentation. For a better understanding, also a general review of the history and the physiological and technological principles of sensory substitution systems is given. Furthermore, possible future developments of this research area are considered.