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. Eyedar digitizes the principles of echolocation, making it an accessible and learnable skill. By leveraging the LiDAR 3D technology in iPhones, Eyedar maps a user’s environment and translates it into audio data, allowing the blind to visualize their surroundings.

As the needs of the blind are often misunderstood by sighted designers and developers, Eyedar was designed by a blind-led UX team. The team built the app with universal best practices of accessibility design and took a blind-first approach. This meant eliminating a visual interface and using voiceover and gestures.

Eyedar provides sequential training, beginning with basic sound and obstacle recognition and progressively challenging users to visualize more complex soundscapes. Over time, the process becomes second nature and allow users to build a clearer picture of the world.

Eyedar emits a LiDAR signal, creating a 3D-map of the user’s 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 was designed exclusively for the blind by a blind-led UX team. As such, it contains no visual interface and is guided exclusively by voiceover and gestures.

Eyedar is available for free in the app store and its open-sourced design allows for continued innovation and customization to best benefit the blind community. The app works with the iPhone 12 and 13 (Pro and Max Pro). As LiDAR and other computer vision technology becomes standard on phones, it will become even more accessible. With about 50 million blind people in the world, Eyedar can reach an unprecedented proportion to make echolocation a learnable and accessible skill.

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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 global blind community. Sponsored by Horizon, the manufacturer of pharmaceutical treatments for diseases that can cause blindness.