Conclusion
Overall, our science project was successful and we’ve learned a lot about sight and echolocation. Our hypothesis was partly correct. For our hypothesis we said that echolocation was going to be the most effective way for blind people to navigate, but it was actually the best, yet it still has a couple of flaws. The most effective method was magnified voice clicks which uses echolocation with and accuracy of 95%, and the least effective method was self made clicks which uses echolocation with an accuracy of 52.6%. The stick came a close second with an accuracy of 94%, which is surprisingly close to the magnified voice clicks. We think that the self made clicks was the least effective because the clicks weren’t loud enough. If the object was far away and the click was quiet, it would be nearly impossible to hear the returning echo with only a 5 minute practice. We think that the magnified clicks was the most effective because they were the loudest compared to the self clicks, and therefore could reach all the corners in the room, making it easy to locate the object. Magnified voice clicks came out to be the most accurate as when we finished our second experiment of using our own volume to determine how loud the clicks can be, our own clicks didn't provide enough power to generate throughout our surroundings, we thought of using something to make those same clicks louder and we decided to record ourselves and playback the recording louder and place this experiment in a room with favourable acoustics. Our results were shocking and had a 42.4% increase of accuracy compared to the self clicks.Our research stated that Blind people can detect objects at a longer distance using long duration of sound. After reading that we started thinking of continuity of sound as an aspect we could use for our experiment and decided to record click and play them back louder during the experiment. As objects that create sound offer a sound reflecting surface, magnifying the sound will create more effective vibrations which helps us determine the location more precisely. Moreover, our findings confirm our hypothesis of the most effective technique to navigate through a visually impaired person’s surroundings is by using echolocation is correct, however we would like to add that magnifying the sound emitted makes navigation more precise and increases the accuracy of determining one's surroundings. There is always room for improvement as our result can be more precise if we were to tweak the experiment we conducted. Instead of only changing the volume to increase it’s progression, you can play around with the pitch to make it more accurate. Our research states that both pitch and loudness of emitted sound change as it fuses the reflections of nearby object. What it basically is trying to say is that pitch is equally important to volume. We are not sure on whether a high pitch or a low pitch added on to high volume can help better detecting, however it will improve echolocation to the point where instead of the average of the experiments being 95% can in fact increase to 100%. To conclude, after formulating all the data from our experiments and personal experience, echolocation is more accurate at aiding navigation for blind people compared to other techniques of relocation as it provides vibrations and reflecting sound waves when emitting sounds which also help create a mental image of the space if done right (keeping future projections of changing the pitch to make it more accurate in mind) rather than tapping and sweeping a cane across to determine one’s surroundings and to navigate.
Overall, our science project was successful and we’ve learned a lot about sight and echolocation. Our hypothesis was partly correct. For our hypothesis we said that echolocation was going to be the most effective way for blind people to navigate, but it was actually the best, yet it still has a couple of flaws. The most effective method was magnified voice clicks which uses echolocation with and accuracy of 95%, and the least effective method was self made clicks which uses echolocation with an accuracy of 52.6%. The stick came a close second with an accuracy of 94%, which is surprisingly close to the magnified voice clicks. We think that the self made clicks was the least effective because the clicks weren’t loud enough. If the object was far away and the click was quiet, it would be nearly impossible to hear the returning echo with only a 5 minute practice. We think that the magnified clicks was the most effective because they were the loudest compared to the self clicks, and therefore could reach all the corners in the room, making it easy to locate the object. Magnified voice clicks came out to be the most accurate as when we finished our second experiment of using our own volume to determine how loud the clicks can be, our own clicks didn't provide enough power to generate throughout our surroundings, we thought of using something to make those same clicks louder and we decided to record ourselves and playback the recording louder and place this experiment in a room with favourable acoustics. Our results were shocking and had a 42.4% increase of accuracy compared to the self clicks.Our research stated that Blind people can detect objects at a longer distance using long duration of sound. After reading that we started thinking of continuity of sound as an aspect we could use for our experiment and decided to record click and play them back louder during the experiment. As objects that create sound offer a sound reflecting surface, magnifying the sound will create more effective vibrations which helps us determine the location more precisely. Moreover, our findings confirm our hypothesis of the most effective technique to navigate through a visually impaired person’s surroundings is by using echolocation is correct, however we would like to add that magnifying the sound emitted makes navigation more precise and increases the accuracy of determining one's surroundings. There is always room for improvement as our result can be more precise if we were to tweak the experiment we conducted. Instead of only changing the volume to increase it’s progression, you can play around with the pitch to make it more accurate. Our research states that both pitch and loudness of emitted sound change as it fuses the reflections of nearby object. What it basically is trying to say is that pitch is equally important to volume. We are not sure on whether a high pitch or a low pitch added on to high volume can help better detecting, however it will improve echolocation to the point where instead of the average of the experiments being 95% can in fact increase to 100%. To conclude, after formulating all the data from our experiments and personal experience, echolocation is more accurate at aiding navigation for blind people compared to other techniques of relocation as it provides vibrations and reflecting sound waves when emitting sounds which also help create a mental image of the space if done right (keeping future projections of changing the pitch to make it more accurate in mind) rather than tapping and sweeping a cane across to determine one’s surroundings and to navigate.