Alternative Sensory Information Displays

The Emoti-Chair: News and Events

• Media Links

• The Emoti-Chair takes its place at its new home at the Bob Rumball Foundation for the Deaf

November 04, 2009

• X Avant New Music Festival - A New Way of Hearing. Featuring the Emoti-Chairs

October 24, 2009

• Concert Accessible to the
  Deaf and Hard of Hearing

March 5, 2009




Concert Flier (pdf)

Media Advisory (word document)

The ASID Project Description

The ASID project explores alternative methods of presenting sensory information from one modality to a different modality. The current focus is on the translation of sound into vibration, where we use the Emoti-Chair as a system for making music and other sounds more accessible as physical vibrations.

The sensory substutition of audio information as tactile stimuil is mainly situationed within the domains of music and film, where we are investigating the use of diffrent tactile stimuil to represent sound originating from music, background or environmental sounds, and speech prosody.

The Model Human Cochlea is the sensory substitution technique we use to translation music into multiple vibrotactile channels in the Emoti-Chair.

Voice coils are our primary mode for presenting sound as vibrations, with music presented along the body, speech displayed along the arms.

Control Interfaces

Another area of our research is situated in the domain of interface and system designs to support multimodal crossmodal displays.

Topics of this research include microprocessor design, user interface designs, and interaction designs supporting alternative information displays that focus on sensory substitution approachess.

Research Team

The team includes members of the CLT lab and the SMART lab:

For information regarding the ASID Project, please contact Maria.Karam @ ryerson.ca