You might agree with me when I say that almost everyone fantasizes of having superhuman powers. What if your fantasies of being a superhuman come true? The students at Royal College of Art in London have developed a mask that can increase your sight and hearing senses to a greater extent. It allows you to choose one conversation or one visual among a cluster of sounds and visuals, then hear or see the one which you want to.
There are two masks developed by the researchers: Eidos Vision and Eidos Audio. Eidos Vision is the one that can capture the scene through a head-mounted camera and then send it to a computer for processing. The scene is captured as it is done in long exposure photography, all patterns and traces which are usually not recognizable to the naked eye are displayed inside the mask for humans to see.
Eidos Audio enhances the hearing capability as it lets a hearer pick one speech among a cluster of speeches. It cancels all the noises and then increases the volume of one which you want to hear. There is a microphone that captures the audio and software that helps in noise cancellation. The headphones send voice directly into the ear through bone sensations.
The team of researchers say that masks can be used in sports like Golf where a player can improve his swing by recognising faults he does at a time. Other application can be illustrated arts where some effects which can be seen in a video only may also be seen in a live performance. It may also help those suffering with ADHD, where people find it difficult to concentrate in noisy environment.
These masks were originally designed to exhibit the technologies of the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London. The team of researchers has four brilliant students who worked on the project, named Millie Clive-Smith, Yuta Sugawara, Tim Bouckley and Mi Eun Kim.