[Noisebridge-discuss] Wednesday: sensory substitution hangout

[Mikolaj Habryn]

On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 6:17 PM, Rachel McConnell <rachel at xtreme.com> wrote:
> Mikolaj Habryn wrote:
>> I have a small bag of http://www.solarbotics.com/products/vpm2/ - one
>> of the open questions is just how large a motor you're going to need
>> to be able to feel it through any given set of clothing. Empirical
>> testing, ahoy.
>
> The vibration of a pager motor is felt quite clearly through layers of
> pillow fluff.  On the head, through (say) a knit hat, no problem at all.

That's true, but I guess I had in mind what levels of modulation you
could distinguish. Let's say, for example, that you wanted to signal
more than just direction. If, instead of just vibrating north, you're
signalling a vector to another person (logical extrapolation of all
these social location maps+GPS services, right?), you might want to
also signal distance and how long it has been since they moved.

One of those you can signal with intensity of vibration, but the other
one you'd have to get more creative (not that it's entirely clear that
you have a large range of intensities available; for a given size of
motor on the other side of a given piece of clothing, you might only
be able to feel it vibrate at >80% power, for example).

More creative might mean signaling with multiple motors, or trying to
pulse the motor in a detectable way, or something else similar, and
some of these might work better with some motors than others. And,
best of all, brains might do better at integrating some types of
signal than others. Maybe it's easy to train a different perception of
pulsed vs continuous then it is to train for a combination of two
motors vs one. I think it's going to be just fascinating trying to
find out :)

m.