I whipped up a very similar prototype a few years ago. The vibration frequency was proportional to distance, and edges were highlighted with sharp jolts. The hope was that you could build a mental map of your surroundings by sweeping the sensor around. The ultimate downfall was the ultrasonic range finders. You need a narrow beam to be able to get any kind of reasonable spatial resolution, however, whenever you hit any sonicaly specular surface (i.e. a flat wall) at an angle that's not very close to perpendicular, the outgoing ping just bounces off to the side, instead of coming back to the detector, giving you a false negative. Which translated into running into walls that are 45 degrees to you. So until we get cheap, robust LIDAR sensors, the idea is mostly a waste of time.
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Amen.
I whipped up a very similar prototype a few years ago. The vibration frequency was proportional to distance, and edges were highlighted with sharp jolts. The hope was that you could build a mental map of your surroundings by sweeping the sensor around. The ultimate downfall was the ultrasonic range finders. You need a narrow beam to be able to get any kind of reasonable spatial resolution, however, whenever you hit any sonicaly specular surface (i.e. a flat wall) at an angle that's not very close to perpendicular, the outgoing ping just bounces off to the side, instead of coming back to the detector, giving you a false negative. Which translated into running into walls that are 45 degrees to you. So until we get cheap, robust LIDAR sensors, the idea is mostly a waste of time.