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Digital Compass + Vibrating Hat = VibroHat
Which way is north? If you don the VibroHat, you’ll soon know, as the part of your head most nearly facing north will be vibrating. This feat is accomplished by using a microcontroller called arduino to poll a digital compass and then activate one of eight pager motors attached to the circumference of the hat (more construction info). I made a virtual demo (you’ll need java, and please give it a sec to load), though it’s really much more fun to wear the device.
I hope to build a future version incorporating a GPS, so that instead of merely vibrating towards magnetic north, the hat could point the way along a route. I’ve made a virtual demo of this situation as well. This would leave the user’s hands free to do things like turn steering wheels, grip bike handlebars, or play laser tag & drink beers, all while navigating. It might also be useful for blind people, or for athletes in training.
The ultimate goal, however, involves bluetooth and a partnership with a hypnotist. Imagine: if the hat were under wireless control, and a hypnotized person were encouraged to “follow the buzz”, you’d have a remote-control person! [UPDATE: the BlueTooth radio has been added, though I'm still looking for the hypnotist]
I built this hat as the final project of a class called Cybernetics & Design of Systems (Fall 2006). Cybernetics is the study of feedback, and I think the vibrohat gets at feedback in a couple of different ways. First, if your goal is to travel north and you begin to veer off course, feedback in the form of vibration will guide you back to a northerly direction. Second, if the hat includes GPS, the user receives feedback on getting to the next waypoint as well as getting to the ultimate destination of the route.
For the third type of feedback, I’ll have to slip into murky neuroscience mode. The hat vibration represents a magnetic sense not normally possessed by humans, and the incorporation of a new sense into day-to-day life surely relies on feedback at a neural level. So, perhaps after wearing the hat for a certain period, the wearer simply knows which direction they face, without having to go through a thought sequence like: “okay, so the vibration is near my right ear, which means that way is north, and thus I am facing west”.
People are capable of such sensory substitution for senses they lose and subsequently have replaced by technology. One example, from the 1970’s, involves leprosy patients who had lost feeling in their fingertips. Touch sensors mounted on the fingertips drove actuators stimulating the forehead, which retained tactile sensitivity. At first, the patients reported that objects encountered by their fingers were felt at their forehead, but soon the subjective source of the feeling shifted to their fingers (Collins & Madey). Can humans apply a similar transformation to a sense with which they were not born? I’ve not worn the hat enough to know yet (yes, I do take it off to sleep, and in the proximity of the ladies), but I can say that within a very short period, the sensation begins to feel more continuous, as if the number of motors had somehow to multiplied. I'd like to think this is the first stage of a full incorporation into the subconscious, or "sensory addition".
Collins, C. C. and Madey, J. M. J. (1974). Tactile sensory replacement. Proc. San Diego Biomed. Symp. pp. 15-26.
tanders at stanford edu
2008 Todd Anderson