Echolocalizator (2015) is a wearable device that aims to change or augment our human way of interacting with the environment. Using “sound spatialization,” this technological helmet simulates the echolocation sonar used by animals like bats and dolphins, highlighting the essential role of technology in the coevolution of humans and animals.

Echolocalizator is, in fact, a perception-bending, environment-transforming portal to a world that simultaneously exists and does not exist. The work proposes a “virtualized reality” where visible phenomena are reinterpreted into synthesized sounds that generate new cognitive associations and perceptive experiences.

The helmet is a cybernetic hybrid computer that recreates physical reality within a biofeedback system and executes a computer algorithm in real time, translating sensory stimuli into a new language for human interpretation. Using ultrasonic sensors placed to the left and right of the forehead and a microcontroller that translates incoming signals into centimeters, this leather wearable device is able to produce a binaural sound atmosphere created in the mind of the user with sounds that correspond to their movements and the positions of objects in their vicinity.

Echolocalizator was a collaborative effort that began in 2015 at the Festival de la Imagen in Manizales, Colombia, and continued in the design laboratories of the University of Caldas.