PROJECT · shipped
Blindfold Lab
An audio-guided practice platform for blindfolded perception: once a session starts, everything is voice, keyboard, or swipe.
Next.js · Supabase · audio pipeline
Learn to See
Without Your Eyes
Trust-based on purpose. It exists for the user's own practice, not to prove anything to anyone.
What it is
Blindfold Lab is a live practice platform for blindfolded perception. The app shows a color or a shape full-screen while you are blindfolded, and you practice perceiving it. Some people report learning to see this way, and the skill apparently responds to consistent practice. I built it to practice myself, made it available to others, and people started using it.
The novel part
You use the app while blindfolded, so the interface can't assume eyes. Once a session starts, everything is audio: spoken guidance announces each trial, reads out your options ("press left arrow for red, or right arrow for blue"), and confirms what you selected, and all input is keyboard arrows or swipe gestures. There are six recorded voices with a text-to-speech fallback, a repeat key for the last prompt, and a guided breathing phase to settle in before the trials begin.
The exercises
Three exercises: contrast detection (black or white), color recognition (red, blue, green, yellow), and shape identification (circle, square, triangle, plus). Sessions run 12 trials across three difficulty tiers, from two options at five seconds of exposure down to four options at two. The app records accuracy and reaction times per trial and suggests moving up a level at 80% accuracy, or down below 50%, measured over your last three sessions.
The trust model
Practice mode has no verification, on purpose. Confirming that someone truly perceived a shape through a blindfold would require video access and would still rest on trusting they're not cheating some other way, so practice mode doesn't pretend to measure anything for anyone else. Results are practice logs for the person training. Cheating isn't something we engineer against in practice mode, because the only person a user could cheat is themselves. A separate research mode uses a cryptographic commitment protocol for people who want their sessions to count as verified trials.
What broke once people used it
Real users found every gap within weeks: audio behavior across devices, sessions abandoned mid-trial. It permanently raised my bar for what "done" means.
Status
Live and running, with a small but real user base.