Matthew Murdock, also known as Marvel’s Daredevil, is a fictional comic book character who’s both blind and superhuman. Through accidental exposure to radioactive waste from a passing truck as a young child in Hell’s Kitchen, New York, Murdock is given superhuman senses while also being blinded by the substance.
Among his powers are super-smell, allowing him top pick up a target’s scent carried in the wind much like a dog, and bat-like echolocation abilities which give him a sort of 3D radar-sense and allow him to “see” around corners, through walls and objects otherwise invisible to normal humans. However, Murdock can only hear things after they happen, as sound travels slower than light.
If you’ve ever wanted to feel like Daredevil, an experimental headset created by students may do just that.
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- Eidios Audio 2
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- Eidios Audio
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- Eidios Vision 2
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- Eidios Vision and Audio
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- Eidios Vision
Students at the Royal College of Arts in London have come up with a unique idea – create a headset that augments and increases some of the wearer’s senses, to the point where you can hear sounds your brain naturally blocks out and see things your eyes pick up but your brain ignores.
The head pieces are called Eidos (no relation to the game company) and are separated into a pair of goggles and a weird headset that looks like something Hannibal Lecter would wear while imprisoned. The goggles, called Eidos Vision, pick up patterns in movement and colours that your brain blocks out. Eidos Vision, in theory, provides you with the same experience as a long-exposure photo, allowing you to see movement more clearly and at a slower rate.
The students see a use for Eidos Vision in analysing movement of athletes, giving you more real-time data about how things work and how your players are performing on the field.
Eidos Audio does a similar thing but this time uses sensitive directional microphones to pick up sounds your brain blocks out and highlights them. You can stand in a crowded train station and “zoom in” on a particular voice. One could, in theory, sit on one side of a stadium during a sports match and have a conversation with someone right across the field.
Eidios Vision is impressive, however, because it picks up on something we can’t possibly process. When you look at yourself in the mirror, what you’re seeing is not you, it’s you a billionth of a second ago. When you see a supernova in the sky, that’s light from a supernova that happened millions and millions of years ago – the light is only reaching us now after travelling incredibly far distances. You can do effectively the same thing with a 60fps or 120fps camera and slowing down the captured video, but it won’t be in real-time.
If the camera additionally allows you to pick up objects in the infrared and ultraviolet spectrums, you won’t need an acid trip to see how awesome the world really is.
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