Visualization of environmental sound for the hearing impaired -Support by manga technique-

Our field of view is about 120 degrees, we receive much information from outside of the field of view from which it is hard to get the information for the hearing impaired. They have poor crisis perception ability as compared to normal persons. Therefore, we have developed a system to visualize environmental sound in order to assist the hearing impaired. Hearing impaired persons can guess sound from movement of objects. For example, contents of talk from lip reading. For environmental sounds, it is hard for them to recognize what happens when the location of the source of sound is unknown. We visualize environmental sound in order to assist the hearing impaired. We take advantage of manga techniques to visualize the environmental sound intuitively. Manga, not using sound, represents sounds in other ways. Thus Manga has powerful potential to describe sound. People who have an affinity for manga can feel a sense of realism even without learning about manga techniques. We can display the environmental sound via manga symbols created by four indicators of sounds, volume, pitch, tone and direction. Concretely speaking, size, speed of movement, font and location of manga symbols are modified by these indicators.