The promise of novel technological strategies and solutions to assist persons with visual impairments (that is, those who are blind or have low vision) is frequently discussed and held to be widely beneficial in countless applications and daily activities. One such approach involving a tactile-vision sensory substitution modality as a mechanism to compensate for vision loss likewise holds such promise. The purpose of this study was to test the effectiveness of the BrainPort vision device system in helping the participants acquire accurate information about the shapes of presented objects at various distances. The BrainPort vision device system--Wicab, BP-WAVE2007--consists of a postage stamp-sized 25 x 25 electrotactile electrode array for the tongue (625 individual pinhead-sized points of contact arranged across the face of the array), a control box, a digital video camera, and a handheld controller for zoom and contrast inversion. BrainPort technology converts images that are captured through a digital camera and presents this information to the brain via electrical stimulation of the tongue through the electrotactile electrode array, augmenting normal sensory channels with this additional spatial information (Arnoldussen & Hogle, 2008). (Contains 1 figure and 3 tables.)