An eyeborg or eye-borg is a cybernetic body apparatus which typically fits on the wearer's head, and is designed to allow people to perceive color through sound waves. It is mostly used by blind people or by people with visual impairments such as color blindness

Color blindness

Color blindness or color vision deficiency is the inability or decreased ability to see color, or perceive color differences, under lighting conditions when color vision is not normally impaired...

 or achromatopsia

Achromatopsia

Achromatopsia , is a medical syndrome that exhibits symptoms relating to at least five separate individual disorders. Although the term may refer to acquired disorders such as color agnosia and cerebral achromatopsia, it typically refers to an autosomal recessive congenital color vision disorder,...

. It works with a head mounted camera that reads the colors directly in front of a person, and converts them in real-time into sound waves.

History

The first eyeborg was created in England in 2003 by Adam Montandon in collaboration with colourblind artist Neil Harbisson

Neil Harbisson

Neil Harbisson is a Catalan raised, Northern Ireland born artist, musician and performer best known for his self-extended ability to hear colours. In 2004 he became the first person in the world to wear an eyeborg. The inclusion of the eyeborg on his passport photo has been claimed by some to be...

. The invention, under the heading Bridging the Island of the Colourblind Project, won a British award in Innovation (Submerge 2004) and a European award in Content Tools and Interface Design (Europrix

Europrix

AwardThe EUROPRIX Multimedia Awards are Europe’s contest for young professionals and students who work on innovative projects in the field of e-contents and design - using whichever multimedia channel or platform...

 2004). In 2007, Peter Kese, a software developer from Kranj

Kranj

' is the third largest municipality and fourth largest city in Slovenia, with a population of 54,500 . It is located approximately 20 km north-west of Ljubljana...

, Slovenia

Slovenia

Slovenia , officially the Republic of Slovenia , is a country in Central and Southeastern Europe touching the Alps and bordering the Mediterranean. Slovenia borders Italy to the west, Croatia to the south and east, Hungary to the northeast, and Austria to the north, and also has a small portion of...

, made further developments to the eyeborg by increasing the number of color hue

Hue

Hue is one of the main properties of a color, defined technically , as "the degree to which a stimulus can be describedas similar to or different from stimuli that are described as red, green, blue, and yellow,"...

s to 360 and adding color saturation through different volume levels. Matias Lizana, a student from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya is currently developing the eyeborg into a smaller chip as part of his final year project. The new chip will allow users to hear colors in stereo and to implant the device.

Color to Sound Scales

Harbisson's Sonochromatic Music Scale (2003) is a microtonal and logarithmic

Logarithmic

Logarithmic can refer to:* Logarithm, a transcendental function in mathematics* Logarithmic scale, the use of the logarithmic function to describe measurements* Logarithmic growth* Logarithmic distribution, a discrete probability distribution...

 scale with 360 notes in an octave. Each note corresponds to a specific degree of the color wheel

Color wheel

A color wheel or color circle is an abstract illustrative organization of color hues around a circle that shows relationships between primary colors, secondary colors, complementary colors, etc....

. The scale was introduced to the first eyeborg in 2004.

COLOR NAME	COLOR	NOTE
RED		F
ORANGE		F#
YELLOW		G
CHARTREUSE		G#
GREEN		A
SPRING		Bb
CYAN		B
AZURE		C
BLUE		C#
VIOLET		D
MAGENTA		Eb
ROSE		E

Harbisson's Pure Sonochromatic Scale (2005) is a non-logarithmic scale based on the transposition

Transposition

Transposition may refer to:Mathematics* Transposition , a permutation which exchanges two elements and keeps all others fixed* Transposition, producing the transpose of a matrix AT, which is computed by swapping columns for rows in the matrix AGames* Transposition , different moves or a different...

of light frequencies to sound frequencies. The scale discards color as being part of a color wheel and ignores musical/logarithmic perception so it can overstep the limits of human perception. The introduction of the new scale to the eyeborg in 2010, allows users to decide whether they want to perceive colors logarithmically or not.

COLOR NAME	COLOR	FREQUENCY
INFRARED		Below 363.797 Hz
RED		363.797 Hz
ORANGE		440.195 Hz
YELLOW		462.023 Hz
GREEN		478.394 Hz
CYAN		551.154 Hz
BLUE		573.891 Hz
VIOLET		607.542 Hz
ULTRAVIOLET		Over 717.591 Hz

External links

• Eyeborg Website Eyeborg chip development site
• http://www.wired.com/underwire/2008/02/cyborg-enables-color-blind-artist-to-hear-his-palette/ Article about an eyeborg user on Wired (USA 2008)
• http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article3423446.ece Eyeborg user example on The Sunday Times (UK, 2008)
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/devon/news_features/2005/eyeborg.shtml Information from BBC (UK, 2005)
• http://www.harbisson.com Neil Harbisson's personal website