[Noisebridge-discuss] Wednesday: sensory substitution hangout

[Rachel McConnell]

OK I ditched my regular Wednesday thing for tomorrow, there are just too
many interesting things happening at NB.  So I will bring my motors (not
as good a form factor as yours But Anyway) and some other assorted Bits.
 I had the idea of a pair of somethings, each tuned to the other, so you
could (for example) find a friend in a crowd.  Or set it to a particular
location, instead of north... really there are so many possibilities!

R

On Tue, 10 Mar 2009 18:34 -0700, "Mikolaj Habryn" <dichro at rcpt.to>
wrote:
> 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.