If you carry a smartphone around in your pocket, you have a GPS navigation system, a compass, an altimeter, and a very powerful computer at your fingertips. It’s the greatest navigational device ever created. To use this sextant of the modern era you’ve got to look down at a screen. You need to carry a phone around with you. It’s just not natural.
For this entry into the Hackaday Prize, [Vojtech Pavlovsky] has an innovative solution to direction finding that will give you a sixth sense. It’s a headband that turns your temples into the input for a clever way to find yourself around the city or a forest, and it does it with just an Arduino and a few other bits.
The idea behind the Ariadne Headband is to create a haptic navigation system for blind people, runners, bikers, or really anybody. It does this by mounting four vibration motors on a headband, connecting those motors to an Arduino, sniffing data from a digital compass, and getting data over Bluetooth from an Android app.
All of these parts come together to form a new sense — a sense of direction. By simply telling the app to make sure you’re always oriented North, or to guide you along the grid of city streets, this headband becomes an inconspicuous and extraordinarily useful way to get around.
This is clever. I remember a kick starter for some bicycle handle bars that worked the same way, by a vibration motor in each handle.
I seem to recall a haptic compass belt that had 1/2 dozen or more vibrators around the waste that indicated magnetic north.
Yep, old buddy of mine created that years back. Called the northpaw https://sensebridge.net/projects/northpaw/
In his case it was an anklet, but I think he also made a belt version.
Came here to post this, glad you beat me to it!
As a southpaw myself, the name always gave me a giggle.
I have wanted something like this so he’s on the right track. But it needs to be invisible. My thought is haptics inside the shoe on the bottom of your feet. There’s already a shoe out there that has a space for some kind of sports tracker.
Or maybe on the inside of a slightly-too-large baseball cap. You could put status LEDs on the visor, just within the wearer’s peripheral vision.
Bounced on my boys third eye to this for hours!
Ouch my third eye!
It reminds me a little to another project which uses the haptics but in the feet (https://techcrunch.com/2014/07/28/smartshoemadeinindia/), but this approach could work quite well.
Replace the vibration motors with conductive pads and introduce an electric current . 4 pads distributed around the head and by vating the phase and amplitude of the signal it could be used to guide you along. With no moving parts and then if you go the wrong way it ups the amplitude ( insert maniacal laugh)
“The idea behind the Ariadne Headband is to create a haptic navigation system for blind people, runners, bikers, or really anybody.”
Watch out for those stairs! Don’t forget about “Z”.