‘Seeing’ through echolocation J
ustin Louchart went blind almost 10 years ago, but he has learned to “see” again using sound. Today, the 20-year-old WMU junior is helping others who are blind do likewise, traveling the world to share his expertise in using simple tongue clicks to detect objects, enabling him to carry on a wide range of activities, from walking to running to riding a bike.
“By making a series of tongue clicks and listening to the sound reflected back, it shows you the distance, size and even the texture of objects. You can make out the world around you.” Before Louchart became blind, he remembers seeing just a few seconds of a documentary that showed two blind people riding bicycles and making clicking noises.
He teaches others the art of flash sonar, a type of echolocation that allows people to sense objects around them by making clicking noises with their tongues and listening to the sound waves reflect off objects back to them.
“The process seemed very intuitive to me,” Louchart recalls. “If you don’t have vision, why not use sound, which you do have, to be able to utilize the visual sense?”
WMU’s own Department of Blindness and Low Vision Studies teaches echolocation as one technique in its orientation and mobility curricula. The department plans to have Louchart demonstrate flash sonar to students this spring.
Memories of that documentary came flooding back to Louchart after he lost his sight. He decided to try flash sonar on his own and made some progress with the technique. His efforts took a giant leap in 2007 after he met Kish.
Louchart, who is studying anthropology at WMU, went completely blind in 2005 due to a combination of genetic disorders and retinal damage he suffered from being born prematurely.
“He started teaching me and made my skills exponentially better,” Louchart says. “You can be self-taught, but your skills don’t get especially good until you learn it formally.”
With help from Daniel Kish, executive director of World Access for the Blind, Louchart taught himself how to see objects through flash sonar.
Louchart uses a cane in tandem with flash sonar. The cane provides excellent acuity roughly 5 feet from an object. Flash sonar can detect objects much farther away, plus he can aim its direction and adjust its pitch and volume to give a surprisingly three-dimensional image of the surrounding environment.
“It’s amazingly straightforward,” Louchart says.
Continued on page 23
14
wmich.edu/magazine