Well yes and no.

It is quite possible for a blind  person to handle the sterring wheel, accellerator, break and all other controls without a problem, however there is no way of actually knowing what is around you or where your steering the thing, and sinse the potential exists for really nasty accidents with a car which could injure yourself or others and likely bust the car too, it would be an incredibly bad idea to try accept under very controlled conditions.  I have done this myself, driving with a driving instructor which was certainly an interesting experience.

In Britain at least there is a major visual element to driving tests, so you could potentially get a really massive fine or even a jail sentance if you tried driving on a public road even with a sighted guide.

so, yes a blind person can drive a car, but no probably not legally or safely.

Of course as Cae jones has said, we are likely to see self driving cars at some point in the future (at least when all the stupid legal hassles are worked out and the things go into actual production), though even there it would be an automated computer system doing the driving not a blind  driver.

Hi camacheck.
Its an interesting concept.
Can a blind person drive a car, yes.
Can they safely do it now? nope.
Could they do it in the future? nope because they are blind and blind people can't drive cars or anything like that.
Its alegal at least in one state of the us I know of but forgot which indiana I think that states the blind can't drive a car because they are blind.
So even if it was possible to drive a car in the future because you are blind you wouldn't be able to anyway unless the laws were updated with new tech.
I don't know about trusting my life to a computer.
Being a tech and hacker, they can fail.
I have been traveling a lot and things can fail.
Firstly most of this is done via gps, cell nets or wifi or something like that.
Bandwidth is not a given for any network not even for the net.
In new zealand compaired to other reagons we do have quite slow net its getting better.
Servers can go down.
Gps satelites can be blocked by bad weather and you can go out of range, it could take some time to find a signal.
Mobile cell coverage depending if you go outside a major city could also die, yes there are places where the net and in fact cell phones either don't exist or are out of coverage.
The other stuff is radar and radio waves its part of the navigation systems and lasers.
As with any radio wireless etc, they can be jammed or simply be lost in other waves, there is the potentual for falier.
Then there is the fact that even if the issue was simple there wouldn't be a way for the user to fix it even if the interface was accessable to them, maybe we will have something robust enough but thats a lot of if going on there.
Even in normal cars there is a chance of falier, most of these are caught early but there have been cases where people have actually died or lost control of their vehicles due to their system crashing on them leaving them with no control at all.
They are not that commen but still happen from time to time.
A big possibility would to be using your android or iphone device, I stayed with a friend in australia that uses her i device for music playback through a stereo and for gps nav and it works well.
So I guess you could get your smart phone to drive a car.
However gps devices can be a bit inacurate to and sometimes can go all over the place to get you to where you want to go.
Oh and there is no stopping at interesting places either, the device goes where you tell it with no error at all that could potentually be boring if you wanted to be senic about yourself.
Machines can't do that binary only has 2 numbers after all.
states on and off no maybe.
I think the best way for the blind to drive a car is if the bind could be made not blind eventually.
Ofcause with the government in general supporting disability things jaws, etc there would be a push not to try that hard because of what would be lost in doing so.
Ofcause its always possible the blind could eventually drive, people in wheelchairs can drive, the deaf can also drive as long as they can see that is.
On the testing side, yeah that could be a problem.
Firstly the blind do not percieve colours the same as sighted do.
We know of words we may associate them to sertain things but probably only the ones we really need.
We can't see 3 green lights or lights on a box so we can't really handle colour the way the sighted do.
Shapes is another thing, unless we touch them on special graphics paper we can't right now do anything in real time.
All this excludes the 3d printing tech which may be the answer to all our issues of being blind in the first place.
I'm not saying never, if its wanted we the blind will probably be able to drive maybe in the far future.
Right now I don't see us doing it for obvious reasons.
The main one, the law will probably never change unless there is a push to.
we are blind, and the blind can't do what they want at least not driving maybe they will never drive.

hi.
with that program, you can not only look or heare beeps, but also read a standart books, read from the computer's screen and etc.
each letter having it's beeps, but i think currently it works only with the hebrew letters. i know all the 22 hebrew letters now with eye music.
and i think you can search it on the internet. type:
eye music. the program it self in english.
kamochek.

Well regarding substitution technology I'm not sure myself, sinse most of those sorts of things I've seen were rather confusing and it was a case of picking out minimal information, sinse learning to read such a large  amount of informational input as sight as sound or even virbration was quite a task, however that doesn't mean something won't be developed in the future that would work, though whether it would work well enough for a person to drive a car safely with it waits to be seen.

Regarding the computer Ai driving a car, that I see as a lot more possible, heck I have recently been using the blind qsquare satnav ap myself and have been very pleased with the amount of new information I get with it., However it irritates me that while the technology of a self driving car exists at the moment, and only requires perfection and production, the main stumbling block in the way of producing that technology is to do with the law and insurance not the technology  itself.

It seems ridiculous that where thousands of blind people are stuck in their houses or forced to pay hundreds of pounds for inconvenient public transport the technology exists to give equal mobility access to what sighted people have, it is due to something as silly as worrying about who sues who if there was an accident.

then again what do you expect when we're living in a society where  parents had to fill in permission slips for their children to be allowed to make daisy chains at school, or where doctors and nurses spend %50 of their time filling in endless piles of forms and notes to make sure they cover their collective rears in case someone takes it into their head to complain.

Hi,
I were at an event some time ago were blind people could drive cars on a air field with a sighted person in the passenger seat. The fun thing was that i didn't need to drive slowlycause i was there early and no one was there so i think.
So we raced  around the airfield and it was really funny.
They had multiple cars standing around there. I drove a BMW i think but i am not sure about that. But there was one car i really liked.
I don't no where they get that from but they had a dodge charger standing in their motor pool. It was fun driving that.
I think that blind people can't drive cars in the future, but when there is a locked of arriar like an airfield and sighted assistance there, you can have a fun time racing around.

Hi, I think if autopilot would drive the car, then there would be no fun at all. I at least would like to control the gass pedal... I never tried driving a car myself, just shifted gears.

Hi kamochek,

> what is vOICe sensory substitution?i didn't hared about that.

The vOICe sensory substitution technology is what much of the research by Amir Amedi's group is based on. It is somewhat similar to the EyeMusic app that you referred to, also conveying images through sound in a scanning fashion with pitch for height, but it favors resolution over color. The reason is that color-blind people get around (and drive cars) without problems - so color is nice to have, but considered less important when having to make trade-offs with effective visual resolution through sound.

You can download The vOICe Learning Edition software for Microsoft Windows from the web page

   http://www.seeingwithsound.com/winvoice.htm

It works with most USB webcams, and on eBay you can for just $60 buy wide-angle USB camera glasses that work with this software, as described on the web page

   http://www.seeingwithsound.com/camera_glasses.htm

There is also a version for Android devices that has recently passed the milestone of a quarter million installs from Google Play at https://play.google.com/store/apps/deta … OICe.vOICe
Apart from Android phones and tablets, The vOICe for Android can also run on Google Glass.

Best regards,

Peter Meijer

Seeing with Sound - The vOICe
http://www.seeingwithsound.com

I agree. I could see the self-driving cars as a possibility, but as far as I'm concerned that's as close as the blind are ever likely to come to driving. And as slowly as legal matters tend to move I have a strong feeling that by the time self-driving cars are made available to the public and the blind are allowed to own and operate them I'll be too old to care.

hi.
here is an example of the eyeMusic.
a recording where i scaning a sqware.
i'll talk in hebrew there, but listen to the beeps.
tell me what do you think is better.
and what do you think: can someone use the eyeMusic and the VOIce?
not at the same time, but using the 2 things.
and also what do you think: can i tell the teacher which teaching me to use eyeMusic about the VOIce program and show it to  her?
i've installed now this program, but also eyeMusic is installed on my computer.
here is a link to the example:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/107 … 875963.WMA
kamochek.

Hi kamochek,

Thank you for your EyeMusic recording.

> and what do you think: can someone use the eyeMusic and the VOIce?

Yes, the mappings are similar enough: left-to-right scanning with pitch for height and loudness for brightness. The main difference is that The vOICe deliberately uses pure tones instead of musical tones.

You can listen to a YouTube clip where The vOICe is used in grasping bright DUPLO bricks from a dark table top, at the URL

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuosPzluCRg

Here I was wearing the camera glasses that I mentioned.

> can i tell the teacher which teaching me to use eyeMusic about the VOIce program and show it to  her?

Perhaps she already knows about The vOICe but had some reason not to tell you about it. I can only guess. The vOICe is globally the most used software of its kind. Maybe just play with both programs for a while to make up your own mind about it. I am always interested in what blind users prefer.

Best regards,   
   
Peter

Seeing with Sound - The vOICe
http://www.seeingwithsound.com

hi.
sorry, here is the link again:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/107 … nstall.msi
kamochek.

hi.
strange, i think i uploaded it well.
but maybe try download it soon, maybe it still uploading.
and question: did you hared of amir amedi's research and of eyeMusic before i said about it?
kamochek.