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Headband Gives Wearer "Sixth-Sense"
An anonymous reader writes "New Scientist reports on a headband developed at the University of Tokyo that allows the wearer to feel their surroundings at a distance — as if they had cats whiskers. Infrared sensors positioned around the headband vibrate to signal when and where an object is close. There are also a few great videos of people using it to dodge stuff while blindfolded."
Augmentation of existing senses has been going on for some time now. In particular, there is a very interesting project running through the Office of Naval Research using Navy Seals and a tongue prosthetic designed to impart sonar information to the tongue using electrical stimulii. Technology like this is very cool stuff that at the very least will help with mission specific tasks, but even better allows folks who have one or more senses compromised to continue to function and navigate their worlds.
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How do I go about http://www.k2.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/perception/HapticRadar/index-e.htmldodging stuff?
My grandmother used anecdotal evidence all the time, and she lived to be 120 years old.
Oh and since Daddypants did not read emails prior to hitting publish here is the fixed link for TFA.
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A sixth sense, that is. It's called the sense of balance. Why is this never included in the senses list?
This will prove invaluable on construction sites. I can't count the number of times I've had to duck a board being swung wildly by my co-worker Curly, only to have the board hit me on the back of the head on the return trip when he turns to face the other direction. This device would completely prevent this type of common construction accident.
I once thought I had a sixth sense while wearing a headband. It turns out it was just on too tight.
Now shrink it, and implant it in my cranium. I'll also take my embedded GPS and compass, accelerometer, laser rangefinder, light spectrometer, infrared/thermal vision, visual magnification, cochlear implant that records everything I hear/say, wireless Internet connection, and optical nerve tie-in for the interface. And hardened ceramic teeth that can be polished clean with fine-grit polishing compound. You have your mission, scientists. Go.
OK cool, but... how fashionable a headband are we talking?
You can have my cynical agnosticism when you pry it from my cold, dead logic.
I made almost exactly the same thing at Towson University last semester with a research grant. I have a Daventech SRF04 ultrasonic rangefinder mounted on a baseball cap which is polled by an Acroname Brainstem PIC module. That data is averaged over a short time and sent out to a servo that is strapped to the user's palm. The end result is that the servo presses against the user's palm with a pressure inversely proportional to the distance read by the rangefinder. It really does work very well, it's very responsive and it's not too dificult to at least avoid bumping into things. The only problem is that it's not in stereo; I would eventually like to add more rangefinders and more servos. The other problem is that the user has to move their head around constantly to get distance information; I talked this over with a blind friend of mine and he suggested that the sensor be mounted on the hand or wrist along with the servo, this way it's a little more intuitive and less cumbersome/dorky-looking/tiresome. I really wish I'd published at least something somewhere; when my advisor was talking about it (it wasn't my idea, I just designed and built it) I remember thinking "I can't believe nobody else has made something like this before." Ah well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70_MwrkDOVU Haptic Radar Video on Youtube. Since the linked site seems to be down.
Does it let you see dead people?
This device doesn't allow you to see any dead people. Not even a little bit.
Swi
a shovel.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I prefer the darpa one sometime ago.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/02/1551207
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XML is the answer.
If your hearing in both ears is good and the environment isn't too noisy, you don't need a headband full of electronics and sensors for this.
With practice you can "image" enough of your environment to get around just from echoes of your own body's sounds or other ambient noises of suitable waveshape. (This is how you get the "closing in" feeling in tight spaces.)
There are reports of a totally blind kid using this effect to ride a bicycle and avoid obstacles. (He made clicking sounds with his mouth to provide a controlled, sharp (low-distance-error) sound, effectively emulating one mode of a bat's sonar.)
"Chirps" (single tones rapidly "swept" at a constant change of frequency per unit time) are potentially far better for imaging and ranging than "clicks" (impulses or short sound bursts that approximate them). But it's not clear that the human brain and vocal system has the necessary structures for generating and processing them correctly.
= = = =
Of course the headband might be much more effective than training up your own sound-generating and sensory systems - which (unlike a bat's or a cetacean's) aren't optimized for this service.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Touch isn't one sense. Temperature, surface detail, and pressure are separate parts of it. Besides balance, there's also proprioception, which lets you know where your body parts are. Then there's the sense of thoughtforms, the ability to know one's own thoughts and feelings, and the sense of self, which is the only thing that lets us do anything useful with our mental models of the world we build out of all the other senses by relating the model of the world to the model of the individual.
You may be surprised to learn there are more than four tastes, too. Besides the sour, salty, sweet, and bitter we're all familiar with, there's a fifth type of taste bud that detects glutamate, a flavor known as'umami' and characterized as 'savory' or 'meaty.'
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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But it will help you dodge one thrown at you.
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I won't call you when this is ready, I'll wurzle you. You don't know what that means yet, but you will, trust me.
With this, someone could be Daredevil in real life.
Here's a kid who does it without any technological aids!
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/07/19/earlyshow/main1817689.shtml
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