You can almost taste the sonar

Let's go down the list of ways in which we've enhanced our senses. We have night vision goggles, as well as plain old eyeglasses like mine, for the eyes. There's even a bionic eye in the works. We have sensitive microphones and headphones/earbuds for the ears. There are guys out there with magnets in their fingertips that supposedly let them "feel" magnetic fields. Smell? Not so much done on this as far as I know, although if anyone knows of technological enhancements for the old schnoz, I'd love to hear about them.

How about taste? Well, how would you like to taste the fact that you're about to walk into a wall? For some 30 years the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition has been working the BrainPort - a neural tongue interface. It works like this: the device has a grid of 144 electrodes that sit on your tongue and send impulses through the sensitive nerve endings that you usually use for taste. The result? Your sensory perception is augmented by whatever sensing technology (sonar, radar, IR, etc.) is hooked to the system. The US Navy is supposedly interested in a sonar version for divers, but apparently the visually impaired can also use the system to "see" their surroundings.

[Thanks to Engadget for bringing this to light. Apparently, they like'd it so much they've written about it twice, unless there are 2 different BrainPorts floating around out there.]