Hacking Our Five Senses and Building New Ones 290
ryanguill writes "Wired has an article about expanding your five (maybe six) senses to allow you to sense other things such as direction. It also talks about hijacking other senses to compensate for missing senses, such as using electrodes in your mouth to compensate for lack of eyesight. Another example is a subject wearing a belt with 13 vibrating pads. The pad pointing north would vibrate giving you a sense of direction no matter your orientation: '"It was slightly strange at first," Wächter says, "though on the bike, it was great." He started to become more aware of the peregrinations he had to make while trying to reach a destination. "I finally understood just how much roads actually wind," he says. He learned to deal with the stares he got in the library, his belt humming like a distant chain saw. Deep into the experiment, Wächter says, "I suddenly realized that my perception had shifted. I had some kind of internal map of the city in my head. I could always find my way home. Eventually, I felt I couldn't get lost, even in a completely new place."'"
Compass belt (Score:5, Insightful)
I built one of the compass belts. You don't need 13 motors. Four is plenty. Of course, you want finer resolution than just the four cardinal directions -- so you have the intensity of the vibration vary. If you make the strength of vibration of the motor vary sinusoidally with the angle, so that when a particular motor is pointing directly north it vibrates at full strength, and when directly south not at all, you'll get a very smooth response. You can easily resolve direction to 10-15 degrees precision with just four motors, and the analog response is less distracting than having motors suddenly turn on and off.
You can also do the analog response without a microprocessor -- the two-axis electronic compass sensors are really two sensors, each sensing the component of the field along their sensitive axis, which gives precisely the sin(theta) response curve you want. The microprocessor gets replaced by a couple op amps, and you cut the motor count dramatically, which saves a fair bit on the cost.
Power required to run the vibrator motors is noticeable. I get about 12-14 hours battery life from 4x NiMH AA cells. The next version will improve that a bit (PWM control instead of linear for the motors); the prototype was designed with circuit simplicity as the primary goal.
I don't have a complete schematic or parts list online; circuit design was done on paper and in my head while soldering it together. You can find a description and pictures here [sf0.org].
Re:Radio would be fun to see (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Radio would be fun to see (Score:1, Insightful)
I highly suggest you go look directly at the sun and see just how not seeing beams of light hurts.
Re:Zen for birds. (Score:4, Insightful)
No, the belt is much better; the iPhone is confined to a poor medium for expressing directionality compared to the belt.
Common sense (Score:3, Insightful)
If only they could develop artificial common sense.
All I know is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Chose a sense (Score:3, Insightful)
Tabasco under your fingernail.
Yes, capital idea! I don't see any way that could turn disastrously painful either!
Re:Just makes sense (Score:3, Insightful)
A pessimist is usually right but only an optimist will change the world.