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This feels really groundbreaking to me. It's like echolocation. Although it also seems to be projecting 3d onto 2d, while true echolocation gives you a 3d picture(?)

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There's stories of blind people using echolocation to get around, so why not do a synthetic version of that instead of this made up encoding scheme (as cool as it is).

I.e. model how sound would propagate in an environment and create the sound an echolocator would actually hear reflected back.

What I was getting at is that would be much more complex, because this uses a camera (2d), while echolocation/our ears is 3d when all is said and done. So to do what you're suggesting, you'd first need some way create a 3d model of the world from the camera's 2d image, and then encode into sound.

At which point, echolocation is probably better.

As I understand it, echolocation gives you a rough 3d model of everything around you, but no indication of flat textures on things. This project would seem to give a 2d image as a sound.

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