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Technologies to Access Space Without Vision. Some Empirical Facts and Guiding Theoretical Principles

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Mobility of Visually Impaired People

Abstract

A large number of technical devices attempt to help blind persons improve their spatial perception and facilitate their mobility . We wish to present here the principles on which these prosthetic perceptual devices function, the conditions of their appropriation, and the general perspectives they open concerning the role of technical objects and systems in the constitution of human experience.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “The content of the perceptual state formed in response to a particular pattern of stimulation—the brain’s operative ‘hypothesis’ about the structure of the impinging environment—is the cause to which the highest probability is assigned given all the available endogenous and exogenous evidence. In the case of vision, this will normally be one of indefinitely many possible three-dimensional scenes.” (Briscoe, forthcoming: [10:6]).

  2. 2.

    But, as Heidegger insists: “It requires a very artificial and complicated frame of mind to 'hear' a 'pure noise. […] In the explicit hearing of the discourse of the other, too, we initially understand what is said […]. Even when speaking is unclear or the language is foreign, we initially hear unintelligible words, and not a multiplicity of tone data.” (Heidegger 1927, §.34, p. 153 [p. 164]).

  3. 3.

    Incidentally, the concept of “pointing” used by Siegle and Warren actually presupposes already a spatial framework (if the subject thinks of her action in terms of the gesture of pointing in this or that direction, this means that she already has the experience of a space). This being so, the process whereby this framework is set up is precisely what we are trying to understand here: what is the process of setting up this framework which subsequently makes it possible to interpret gestures as gestures of pointing?

  4. 4.

    Epstein et al. (1986) have studied, in very controlled conditions, the question of the awareness of the existence of an external space through the use of a sensory substitution device—a question we considered again in Auvray et al. [1].

  5. 5.

    The notion of “distal” implies at the same time the idea of “aspect” and of “perspective” on the object: the distal perception of an object, precisely because of the possibility of having access to the latter from an infinity of possible positions, is the perception of the object “under a given aspect”: the aspect that the object presents as “seen from here”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sorbonne Universités, Université de Technologie de Compiègne, EA 2223 Costech (Connaissance, Organisation et Systèmes Techniques), Centre Pierre Guillaumat - CS 60 319-60 203, Compiègne, France

    Charles Lenay & Gunnar Declerck

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  1. Charles Lenay
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  2. Gunnar Declerck
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Correspondence to Charles Lenay .

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  1. Université de Rouen Normandie, Rouen, France

    Edwige Pissaloux

  2. Universidad Panamericana, Aguascalientes, Mexico

    Ramiro Velazquez

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Lenay, C., Declerck, G. (2018). Technologies to Access Space Without Vision. Some Empirical Facts and Guiding Theoretical Principles. In: Pissaloux, E., Velazquez, R. (eds) Mobility of Visually Impaired People. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54446-5_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54446-5_2

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