Glossary

Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.

11 results found in Sensory Substitution.

Active Perception (Active Sensing, Sensorimotor Exploration)
A view of perception in which the perceiver is not a passive receiver of stimuli but an active agent who moves, orients, and manipulates the environment to gather the sensory information needed for a …
Affective Haptics (Emotional Haptics)
A subfield of haptic interaction design concerned with using tactile and kinaesthetic feedback — vibration, pressure, temperature, squeezing, stroking, heartbeat-like pulsation — to communicate, evoke…
Audio-to-Haptics Translation (Audio-haptic translation, Audio-to-vibration conversion)
A class of techniques that convert audio signals — either recordings of real-world interactions or AI-generated sounds — into vibrotactile patterns that can be rendered through actuators embedded in p…
EyeMusic
A visual-to-auditory sensory substitution device that converts images into sound, enabling people who are blind to perceive visual information including shape, location, and color. EyeMusic uses a lef…
Haptic Icon (Hapticon)
A short, structured vibrotactile or force pattern designed to carry meaning in the same way a graphical icon or audio earcon does, allowing users to recognize a category of information — an alert, mat…
Haptic Rendering (Haptic display rendering)
The process of computing and outputting touch-based signals — forces, vibrations, textures, or friction — so that a user can perceive virtual or remote objects through the sense of touch. Haptic rende…
Material Perception (Material recognition)
The perceptual processes by which people identify and characterize the materials that objects are made of — such as wood, metal, glass, leather, fabric, or stone — using visual, tactile, auditory, and…
Tactile Dowsing
An interaction technique that uses vibrotactile feedback to guide a user toward a target direction in space without visual cues. The term draws an analogy to water dowsing, where a divining rod suppos…
The vOICe (vOICe)
One of the earliest and most widely studied visual-to-auditory sensory substitution devices, developed by Peter Meijer in 1992. The vOICe converts camera images into sound by scanning left to right, m…
Video-to-Haptics (Video to Haptics, V2H)
A class of techniques that automatically generate haptic feedback (typically vibrotactile or force cues) from visual content in video, so that viewers feel sensations synchronised with what they see. …
Visual Prosthetic (Visual Prosthesis, Vision Prosthetic)
A device or system that provides visual information to people who are blind or have severe visual impairments through alternative sensory channels or direct neural stimulation. Visual prosthetics rang…