does that guy in the picture have a… boner?

Will this lead to mass migrations?

@bort/matt:

Why not? I can (now, sometimes I can get turned around and be wrong, but its not common) generally sense which cardinal I’m facing, even in the dark and in unfamiliar territory. Why wouldn’t this be a possible way to train your inner directional sense to be more sensitive? I like it. :p

that sounds pretty awesome, actually. it’d be cool to put this in a hat, and maybe just have it apply really gentle pressure in whichever direction north is. you could use the same array of hat-mounted feedback devices to give yourself other senses. imagine being able to sense electromagnetic fields, or using sonar to sense what is around you. cool!

In fact, even cooler than the compass is what he says in the article:

“the belt has additional features: it can be connected via serial to my iphone which delivers up a bearing to an arbitrary destination. i have a first generation iphone, which means my current location is highly approximate, but for distant locations it works great.”

so you can set yourself a waypoint and ‘feel’ your way towards it! for some reason i just find that really fantastic.

Why 12 points?

It would seem more logical to have 16 to me. I know it wouldn’t matter if you were just “feeling” north, but what if you actually wanted to navigate? With a little more thought you could quickly tell if you were going north by northeast. With 12 you don’t get that, you don’t even really get northeast.

Obviously the more points the more accurate, with a continuous loop being ideal.

I would probably use something other than a vibrating motor too, maybe setup a switch that just is on or off and pokes you. Might save battery life that way instead of constantly vibrating, plus that constant buzz would be pretty annoying if anyone else was around..

“I have a clue that’s pointing in THIS direction”
“omg i so have a clue”
“i have a RAGING clue”
“let’s follow YOUR clue!”
the hardy brother’s two young whipper snappers with a knack for solving crime.

BUUUT:
that would be awesome for blind people like with a bit of development it can really do allot

-hero

Hmmmmm…sooooo…is his “tent” the needle or something?

How about a system of bladders that puts a gentle pressure on you? Or maybe some piezo elements that make you warmer/colder.

I would love a magnetic sensor like some animals posses, I believe it is a small piece of iron connected to some nerves, should look into that.

a possible fun use would be a position aware networked paired set for couples that “pointed” towards each other. Probably only accurate at a distance though.

..alzheimer, they would forget what it was and be freaked.

And incidentally, I understand women get sexually excited by vibration, but personally it doesn’t work for me (and that’s so for most men I think)

Excuse the broken post, something fell on the enter key as I was posting.

This reminds me of a device in a Asimov book, (caves of steel?) a small pebble like device is given to a man to find an office in a building. He holds the device to point in front of him and it will produce heat as it become correctly aligned (i.e the warmer/colder game) it is aware of its location and updates its ‘current waypoint’ for turn by turn directions. The beauty is you don’t have to walk around looking like a tourist. well…. whos up for building this then?

“And incidentally, I understand women get sexually excited by vibration, but personally it doesn’t work for me (and that’s so for most men I think)”

I don’t think you can say that about most men…

Maybe you have some sort of distorted perception that “toys” that vibrate are all for women…

Jackhack,

http://web.archive.org/web/20071220230712/http://www.bmezine.com/news/pubring/20040226.html

Apparently it was pulled off of the web, that’s the last archived version of it.

@dan
One possibility is using these: http://hackaday.com/2008/12/21/scratch-built-air-muscles/

A main problem is probably actuating these things; I imagine that could get bulky.

But build the belt right, with overlapping muscles, and you could use ‘tightness’ as an indicator. This would also work with electrically actuated materials.

Anyone know any cheap, non-bulky, electronically actuated muscle-a-likes? :P

@AbsoluteZero
I base my generalisation about vibration not stimulating men (-apart from personal views-) on the simple observation that there are no vibrating sextoys for men really AFAIK, there are some that attach to men but they are meant to please the woman, this simple observation seems to support my theory.
To me vibration numbs, enough said.

hahaha i cant believe paople are still talking about the sex toy thing

@andar_b

I think your refering to Kevin Warwick who I believe did it, or at least the same thing through several implants and using a helmet to input senses like Ultra-sonic detection simular to bats.

wow – I think the idea is pretty awesome. I can think of a few improvements:

- why make it point north? This would be far more helpful if coupled with a navigation system. You select your destination on your phone and will be directed towards it!
As mentioned above – this would help in a foreign city and prevent you from looking like a tourist. You could also use it for hiking of cycling.

- a constant vibration might get annoying. A constant pressure might not be noticeable after a while of walkin straight. Why not pulse the vibrators if indicating the same direction? Increasing delays for constant direction, no delay if rotating. One could even encode the distance that still needs to be traveled.

This could also reduce power consumption and wearout.

I wonder if it would work to have two different vibration patterns: constant vibration for north and pulsing for a destination. When the two are the same it would pulse slowly or something.

Have you tried piezo? Modern fighter jets use piezo elements in the gloves run at different frequencies to simulate the sensation of PRESSURE. Running them at lower frequencies produces sensations discernible as vibration (like when we use them to make noise) so you could (theoretically) use the pressure for direction sense and the lower-frequency vibration for signals.

@schobi: uh, the system already provides navigation to a waypoint. Congratulations on reading the whole thing, huh?

@mike
He explains he used a funnelIO board from sparkfun, which is based on the arduino, which is the based on the atmel atmega168