Giving humans a compass-like directional sense via tactile input
This wired article describes the “feelSpace belt”; a belt with 13 vibrator pads that detects the Earth’s magnetic field and communicates its direction to the wearer by making the pad facing in that direction vibrate.
Here is an old lecture about the feelSpace belt.
The Wired article also talks about other enhanced senses routed through the tactile sense (Wicab/Bach-y-Rita’s team’s tactile display, which we’ve discussed before (see also the tonguevision weblog), the same lab’s inner ear balance-detector replacement, and a device for pilots that tells you which way is down).
Also, I should mention that some people have had magnets implanted in their fingertips so as to sense magnetic fields. Don’t do this though; the magnet implants eventually become infected/rejected and have to be removed (although that article holds out hope that perhaps some day a better, safer design will be found).
Here are what I think are the most interesting parts of the (newer) Wired article, which have to do with the feelSpace belt.
… a wide beige belt lined with 13 vibrating pads — the same weight-and-gear modules that make a cell phone judder. On the outside of the belt were a power supply and a sensor that detected Earth’s magnetic field. Whichever buzzer was pointing north would go off. Constantly.
“It was slightly strange at first,” Wächter says, “though on the bike, it was great.” He started to become more aware of the peregrinations he had to make while trying to reach a destination. “I finally understood just how much roads actually wind,” he says. He learned to deal with the stares he got in the library, his belt humming like a distant chain saw. Deep into the experiment, Wächter says, “I suddenly realized that my perception had shifted. I had some kind of internal map of the city in my head. I could always find my way home. Eventually, I felt I couldn’t get lost, even in a completely new place.”
The effects of the “feelSpace belt” — as its inventor, Osnabrück cognitive scientist Peter König, dubbed the device — became even more profound over time. König says while he wore it he was “intuitively aware of the direction of my home or my office. I’d be waiting in line in the cafeteria and spontaneously think: I live over there.” On a visit to Hamburg, about 100 miles away, he noticed that he was conscious of the direction of his hometown. Wächter felt the vibration in his dreams, moving around his waist, just like when he was awake.
….
When the original feelSpace experiment ended, Wächter, the sysadmin who started dreaming in north, says he felt lost; like the people wearing the weird goggles in those Austrian experiments, his brain had remapped in expectation of the new input. “Sometimes I would even get a phantom buzzing.” He bought himself a GPS unit, which today he glances at obsessively. One woman was so dizzy and disoriented for her first two post-feelSpace days that her colleagues wanted to send her home from work. “My living space shrank quickly,” says König. “The world appeared smaller and more chaotic.”
Note however that the talk slides say that subjects did not claim that it gave them a new sense (I didn’t listen to the talk).