The DolphinView Helmet allows you to "see" as your favorite sea creature

The good news: a helmet exists that helps you to "see" as a dolphin. The bad news: you will have to make this DolphinView headset yourself. The other good news: it is not too complicated or too expensive, at least according to its inventor, Andrew David Thaler, ecologist and editor of the Southern Fried Science Conservation Site.

First, the science of dolphins: dolphins have excellent views, but they can also navigate using echolocation. Essentially, they make clicks using a fat part of the jaw called the melon. These clicks bounce off the objects around them and differ depending on where the object is located. The dolphin then uses his jaw to interpret this information in order to understand what is happening.

To make a DolphinView helmet, Thaler used a simple LIDAR unit to create a system that pulsates when an object gets closer. But how do you get these impulses to the jaw?

The closer, we poor, melon-less humans can get to the echolocation is probably a bone helmet drivers. Sound is a vibration, and bone-conductive headphones use speakers or tiny motors to send vibrations directly to the top of your jaw and into your inner ear and your brain. As James Vincent of The Verge wrote in a review: "This is Feeling Strange."

Thaler therefore linked LIDAR to bone-conduction headphones. You can find instructions on GitHub and Thingiverse. The materials cost less than $ 100, and the code is "barely 15 lines", but you have to combine a few components.

Photo by Andrew Thaler

Thaler writes that it took a while to get used to the sensory overload of constant drum clicks. This is not a super powerful system, and there is a slight delay. But still, he writes, "as you walk, you will certainly begin to understand what all clicks mean, and with a little practice, you can easily spot things like open doors with your eyes closed."

Either just, we do not know enough about dolphins to say that it is exactly how they "see". But the concept is solid and, come on, who does not want to experience a new way of seeing the world?