Horizon is a healthcare company that manufactures multiple treatments, including for two diseases that can cause blindness. But their commitment to their patients goes beyond preventing vision loss to sponsoring and supporting accessibility solutions for anyone who is blind or visually impaired.

Echolocation is a powerful visualization tool for the blind. It’s a form of sensory substitution using clicking sounds that bounce off surfaces to map one’s surroundings. Inspired by the life-changing power of echolocation and determined to change the fact that only 1% of the blind can echolocate, we created Eyedar.

In 2020, LiDAR became standard hardware on iPhones, making Eyedar possible. In 2021, we began experiments that translated LiDAR into soundscapes. Blind users—especially those experienced with echolocation—were consulted from the beginning. They, along with scientists who study echolocation and brain activity, were instrumental in developing Eyedar’s functionality and user experience.

Eyedar is the first app that teaches the blind to visualize their world with sound. It was inspired by echolocation—a form of sensory substitution where the blind use the sense of hearing to visualize their surroundings.

Eyedar digitizes the principles of echolocation, making it an accessible and learnable skill. By leveraging the newly available LiDAR 3D technology in iPhones, Eyedar maps a user’s environment and translates it into 3D audio data, allowing the blind to visualize their surroundings. Changes in pitch, volume, and spatial sound convey information on the size, shape, distance, and direction of objects.

Eyedar provides sequential training, beginning with basic sound and obstacle recognition and progressively challenging users to visualize more complex soundscapes and navigate with greater confidence. Over time, the process is designed to become second nature and allow users to build a clearer picture of the world around them.

For Eyedar to live up to its enormous potential, it needed to demonstrate an understanding of a blind person’s needs, habits, and challenges. To that end, Horizon consulted and partnered with blind users from the very beginning.

They, along with neuroscientists and experts in echolocation, were instrumental in developing not only Eyedar’s functionality, but also its user experience.

Our blind-led UX team built the app with universal best practices of accessibility design and took a blind-first approach to design. As such, this meant doing away with a visual interface. Instead, the navigation exclusively uses voiceover and gestures to allow our users to use the app with ease.

As we progress, the input of users will be vital for further development, allowing for the app to grow ever more useful for the blind population.

Eyedar emits a LiDAR signal from a user’s iPhone, creating a 3D-map of their surroundings. A 100-point vertical line array sweeps from left to right across the LiDAR field, and each point is assigned a pitch tone from low to high, bottom to top. As the line sweeps the field, each point emits its assigned tone, with higher (close) or lower (distant) volume depending on proximity to the user. The result is, to the untrained ear, a lot of noise. But with practice and training, the mind becomes accustomed to the noise, patterns begin to emerge, and a clearer mental picture of the world is achievable.

Several prior fMRI studies have shown that with visual-audio sensory substitution, and with echolocation specifically, it is the brain’s visual cortex which processes the information, leading to a “vision-like experience” in practitioners of echolocation.

Eyedar has the potential to redefine what it means to be blind. Echolocation has already shown how it can positively impact the lives of those who use it, and the only impediment to widespread adoption is the accessibility of learning the skill. Eyedar removes that.

Eyedar launched in April of 2022. With nearly 50 million blind people in the world, smartphone usage near-ubiquitous, and LiDAR and other computer vision technology increasingly available, Eyedar can reach an unprecedented proportion of the blind community to make echolocation a learnable and accessible skill.

Eyedar is available for free in the app store. It is also freely available as an open-sourced app with its codebase released under an MIT open-source license on GitHub. This will allow for continued innovation and customization of the app to best benefit the blind community.

Healthcare/pharmaceutical communications in the United States are governed by the Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Prescription Drug Promotion.

Eyedar is the first app that digitizes the principles of echolocation for the blind and makes the ability to visualize with sound an accessible and learnable skill for the community. Sponsored by Horizon, the manufacturer of pharmaceutical treatments for diseases that can cause blindness.