I own one of these - bought it pre-made years ago rather than assembling the kit myself. It's a ton of fun, and really does give me a more-intuitive sense of direction. After wearing it for a while around places I go to regularly, I keep that intuitive sense of direction without having to wear it.
I've mostly stopped wearing it though, because it looks a lot like a GPS-based parole-monitoring device, and I got tired of questions/comments :)
One of the "hmm... things to make" is a lidar detector for things behind a car that then is mapped to an array of the vibration motors that are in the back of a driver's seat - so that you could feel a car passing you.
> Because of the plasticity of the brain, it has been shown that most wearers gain a new sense of absolute direction, giving them a superhuman ability to navigate their surroundings.
So you would say that this quote isn't exaggeration?
I was thinking the same thing (as in this resembles a GPS ankle-bracelet).
It sounds like the original research used a belt, which to me sounds like a more subtle device to wear:
> The original idea for North Paw comes from research done at University of Osnabrück in Germany. In this study, rather than an anklet, the researchers used a belt. They wore the belt non-stop for six weeks, and reported successive stages of integration.
I'm curious how well oriented you felt before. I currently always feel like I can point to north no matter what, so I'm wondering if I'd benefit from this or not? I suppose those abilities get worse when I'm not in a city with an aligned grid or inside a building, like hiking on a trail where you can't see the sun. Still, I'm not sure what I'd gain from this and curious if there's a next level of awareness to attain.
> As you might have guessed by the long period with no posting, Sensebridge is out of business. We’ve been out of stock on Northpaw Kits since late 2016; we do not have plans to make more kits.
Unfortunately at €2300, this isn't something that people who want to try learning absolute direction sense can purchase without much thought. I suppose the high price is due to having to pass certification as a medical device?
IIRC Oliver Sacks was interested in this kind of thing. Think there's an episode of Radiolab where he talks about how ho used to carry around a couple of extremely strong, oblong magnets in his pockets that would stay oriented north even while he moved around. He wanted to see if his brain could learn to make sense of the input and develop a new sense, akin to the magnetic navigation that retain birds have. Not sure if he ever developed the new sense but the comments here suggest that he might have been able to.
Another fun fact: evidently, one third of Earth's languages (not one third of speakers mind you) do not have words for "left" and "right" and instead use cardinal terms for everything. Speakers of such languages presumably then must know their orientation at all times.
Earth's magnetic field is way too small to orient magnets in someone's pocket. The level of friction is substantial! For example: Even the strongest rare earth magnets do not self-orient when sitting on a table. There's a reason compasses require very-low friction bearings (either needle point or water).
In Hawaii people still use "mauka" (towards the mountains) and "makai" (towards the ocean) to describe where they are, so you might say, "it's on the makai side of downtown," to describe an area or, "go mauka from the intersection" to indicate a directional vector. They also use "windward" and "leeward" to describe sides of the island sometimes, and will give you directions from local landmarks (Zippy's is a good one, everyone tends to know where those are, or they can see the orange sign easily) to other locations.
> do not have words for "left" and "right" and instead use cardinal terms for everything. Speakers of such languages presumably then must know their orientation at all times.
Huh, interesting. Do you know if they actually do know their orientation at all times, or is it just that "west" is always "left" and "east" is always "right", regardless of absolute orientation?
Really basic concept but helpful for in-city navigation for someone without sight. The downside is it works by using both channels in a stereo headphone setup, which means you are dulling your audial sensitivity to the area around you.
Something like this seems to be an even better concept in terms of addressing that.
I also wonder if this could simply be added to existing smartwatches.
I thought about building something like this about 20 years ago, but decided not to.This is actually a skill you can teach yourself if you just start paying attention. It works pretty much everywhere except for in labyrinth-like buildings. The last time I couldn't figure out which Way North was was in Lord Leicester hotel in warwick 5 years ago.
You can teach yourself a lot of "sixth senses" if you try hard enough!
When I was in the Navy as an Officer of the Deck (OOD), I used to be able to visually measure distances on flat water in the range of ~500 yards to a mile within a few tens of yards because I had an internal sense of how big objects were and how they would look at those ranges. This was because I constantly had to measure ranges on radars and via moboards[0] when I was a OOD-in-training and so I learned quickly how to measure distances visually.
I also learned how to estimate how a ship was moving in ports and transit canals and how to adjust that using engines simply by looking around, much like you can adjust how you walk on a surface depending on senses from your whole body about what type of surface it is, how stable it is, etc. On gravel, most people can sense a bit of slippage as they walk from their feet, they might sense their body alignment from feet to head moving slightly due to that slippage, etc. and all those senses are used to tell "I need to slow down here" or whatever. For ships, you get an idea for what direction the bow and stern are moving, how they relate to your control angles, how that relates to what you see around you, and also integrates your body senses, because your body is a finely-tuned acceleration sensing machine.
Anyways, I wish I were still an OOD today, because I would try and create some tools like this that would help me there. Even this anklet itself would have been helpful when I was on duty, to tell me when the helmsman was asleep!
I’m not sure if I have an intuition for which way the compass directions are due to nature or nurture. I was encouraged to think about it from an early age, but that doesn’t prove I wouldn’t have just had that kind of intuition anyway.
It’s a useful nano superpower, though. It’s quite often that I use it to pick the right direction to head without having to get out a map on my phone, or other such cheat.
As the parent comment mentions, there are times when it is tricky. I often emerge from one of several exits from an unfamiliar London Underground station and have to spend a few minutes orientating myself. Often the fastest way is to just look for one of those maps they put in glass cabinets and figure it out from the shape of the road junctions.
I have always had a very strong internal sense of direction and I've found that it relies strongly on knowing which way is north. This means that when I'm in a mall or other large building (malls are the worst) I get very lost and have to think hard about which way is which. I usually have to paint a birds eye view and know which stores are on which corner of the mall and orient myself that way. This also means that occasionally when I'm in a new city, I get north/south mixed up and am hopelessly lost
During the daytime, if you know roughly what time it is and roughly where the sun is, that’s good enough to give you close enough to the cardinal directions for most purposes not involving a 10mi trek out of the woods.
Other than the part where you'd have a battery strapped to you, this could be interesting to adapt to firefighting scenarios. If you could walk up to a structure and do a calibration so that instead of telling you which way North was it was calibrated to the direction of the face of the building (the "A-side" in most firefighting vocabs) then you could use the feedback from it when inside to know which side of the building you were facing despite being visually cut off and disoriented.
I had this same idea when I was in university and built one in my embedded systems class. It was pretty cool to use when I was on my motorcycle.
In addition to a north facing mode, I also added a location mode which would always point to a specified lat/lon location. This was cool for just randomly exploring while always knowing where home is.
I wonder what else you can trigger like this to get a sense of something? Like having it buzz when you are near a taco stand, maybe that would give you a sense for finding nearby tacos over time through some latent factors that are common between taco stands? Probably a more useful case than the taco stands would be having it buzz some time before it rains. Then you can really develop that sense of feeling weather come "through your bones."
This is some serious technology. It's not trying to sell you some junk, its just pure hardware to affect a biological response. I wonder how long the effects last? How often do you need to be wearing this thing? What about your local environment, is it more difficult to maintain a sense of north in places without a uniform, cardinal direction based street grid, or some nearly constantly visible landmarks on the horizon for example? The sun alone can't be relied upon beyond just a general sense of vague north, since it changes its course throughout the year.
Great thing! If you want to revisit this project: you can get PCBs made with e.g. JLCPCB, PCBWay, OSHpark or others for a just a few dollars plus shipping now. That might help with the rats nest of cables that you had in that box.
I remember reading about how certain languages didn't have words for left & right, but used cardinal directions instead(0), and always wondered how they have an intuitive sense of where north is just to make themselves clear. It would certainly help to have it though.
(0) - ie: HokeyPokey would be a line of kids standing in a certain direction - you put your north foot in, you take your north foot out, you put your south foot in.. etc
The two main ways are based on geographical landmarks (west is towards the ocean, south is towards the desert, north is downriver, etc.) and the other is based on the sun/moon. East is the direction the sun/moon rises and west is the direction the sun/moon sets. One of the fascinating things I learned about antiquity is they would often orient their maps so east (the direction of the rising sun) was at the top of the map. They didn’t have magnetic compasses so there wasn’t anything special about north to cause them to orient their maps in that direction.
This seems like it would be distracting when near any ferrous material? If you walk around the inside of a building with a magnetic compass, you would be surprised how often the needle deviates from North.
This is one of those things that I would love to have while at the same time know most people I know would be befuddled as to why I'd want such a thing.
Can someone help me understand what it means to develop the sixth sense for north? Does it mean:
a) The user must be wearing the anklet at all times to initially calibrate but their body is able to determine how much rotation / transposition they have undergone in order to point north.
b) After training, one could tell which way is north without ever having to put on the anklet again
But once users spend a lot of time in an area wearing the device, they have a better ability to navigate that area even with the device removed. I imagine it's similar to how you would be able to navigate your home in low light
It's probably B. I have a fairly intuitive sense for north even without ever using this, although it does get confused sometimes. I've learned not to trust it coming out of the subway into tall buildings with narrow streets because more often than not I'll start heading a completely different direction than the way I wanted to go. I can see how this would help develop that sense, and I wonder if I'd have more success if I tried it
Do these ever get confused by the things that ordinarily screw up compasses? (eg. iron deposits, power lines, metal walls, etc)
Firefighters navigating in smoke-filled buildings could benefit from something that helps them maintain an absolute sense of direction, but guessing that might be too hostile an environment.
Would you actually need to have the vibrating motors correspond to north to make it work? I assume that your mind would eventually map things even if it was motors vibrating at different fingertips or something else that didn't easily correspond to compass directions, as long as it was consistent.
That is a fascinating project. We were just having a discussion about this last week, how some people seem to know intuitively what direction is which, and then there's me, where I have no freaking idea what direction I'm facing unless I have a watch and can see the sun lol.
[+] [-] isaacdl|3 years ago|reply
I've mostly stopped wearing it though, because it looks a lot like a GPS-based parole-monitoring device, and I got tired of questions/comments :)
[+] [-] shagie|3 years ago|reply
One of the "hmm... things to make" is a lidar detector for things behind a car that then is mapped to an array of the vibration motors that are in the back of a driver's seat - so that you could feel a car passing you.
[+] [-] ASalazarMX|3 years ago|reply
So you would say that this quote isn't exaggeration?
[+] [-] hex4def6|3 years ago|reply
It would be really cool to see another version with smaller electronics, flex PCB, etc.
Other features, like connection to a smart phone for waypoint navigation would be neat.
[+] [-] bentcorner|3 years ago|reply
It sounds like the original research used a belt, which to me sounds like a more subtle device to wear:
> The original idea for North Paw comes from research done at University of Osnabrück in Germany. In this study, rather than an anklet, the researchers used a belt. They wore the belt non-stop for six weeks, and reported successive stages of integration.
[+] [-] etrautmann|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MisterTea|3 years ago|reply
I'd be very attempted to gruffly retort "murder and racketeering charges" and see how fast they stop being curious.
[+] [-] stjohnswarts|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] permo-w|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] insane_dreamer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mabbo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wanderingstan|3 years ago|reply
It morphed into a product for the visually impaired and is still available today. [2]
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C34&q=fee... [2] https://feelspace.de/en/
[+] [-] shard|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] staplung|3 years ago|reply
Another fun fact: evidently, one third of Earth's languages (not one third of speakers mind you) do not have words for "left" and "right" and instead use cardinal terms for everything. Speakers of such languages presumably then must know their orientation at all times.
[+] [-] beambot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ok_dad|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corny|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kelnos|3 years ago|reply
Huh, interesting. Do you know if they actually do know their orientation at all times, or is it just that "west" is always "left" and "east" is always "right", regardless of absolute orientation?
[+] [-] noja|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _Microft|3 years ago|reply
https://www.wear.works/ (for blind marathon runners)
https://www.carlosterminel.com/wearable-compass (scroll down for various pictures)
https://pganssle.github.io/HaptiCap/
https://blog.adafruit.com/2020/04/08/this-haptic-compass-bel...
https://makeitbreakitfixit.com/2016/06/22/haptic-compass-ban...
[+] [-] BeefWellington|3 years ago|reply
Really basic concept but helpful for in-city navigation for someone without sight. The downside is it works by using both channels in a stereo headphone setup, which means you are dulling your audial sensitivity to the area around you.
Something like this seems to be an even better concept in terms of addressing that.
I also wonder if this could simply be added to existing smartwatches.
[+] [-] ok_dad|3 years ago|reply
Many headphones have a feature where they pass-thru the external audio, so perhaps you could use that with this as an audio overlay.
[+] [-] googlryas|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ok_dad|3 years ago|reply
When I was in the Navy as an Officer of the Deck (OOD), I used to be able to visually measure distances on flat water in the range of ~500 yards to a mile within a few tens of yards because I had an internal sense of how big objects were and how they would look at those ranges. This was because I constantly had to measure ranges on radars and via moboards[0] when I was a OOD-in-training and so I learned quickly how to measure distances visually.
I also learned how to estimate how a ship was moving in ports and transit canals and how to adjust that using engines simply by looking around, much like you can adjust how you walk on a surface depending on senses from your whole body about what type of surface it is, how stable it is, etc. On gravel, most people can sense a bit of slippage as they walk from their feet, they might sense their body alignment from feet to head moving slightly due to that slippage, etc. and all those senses are used to tell "I need to slow down here" or whatever. For ships, you get an idea for what direction the bow and stern are moving, how they relate to your control angles, how that relates to what you see around you, and also integrates your body senses, because your body is a finely-tuned acceleration sensing machine.
Anyways, I wish I were still an OOD today, because I would try and create some tools like this that would help me there. Even this anklet itself would have been helpful when I was on duty, to tell me when the helmsman was asleep!
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuvering_board
[+] [-] tokamak-teapot|3 years ago|reply
It’s a useful nano superpower, though. It’s quite often that I use it to pick the right direction to head without having to get out a map on my phone, or other such cheat.
As the parent comment mentions, there are times when it is tricky. I often emerge from one of several exits from an unfamiliar London Underground station and have to spend a few minutes orientating myself. Often the fastest way is to just look for one of those maps they put in glass cabinets and figure it out from the shape of the road junctions.
[+] [-] xcskier56|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aleken|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roughly|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ehxor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doctoboggan|3 years ago|reply
In addition to a north facing mode, I also added a location mode which would always point to a specified lat/lon location. This was cool for just randomly exploring while always knowing where home is.
[+] [-] asdff|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdff|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Invictus0|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _Microft|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sparrish|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maliker|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.surfacemag.com/articles/north-sense-cybernetic-i...
[+] [-] aryamaan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soperj|3 years ago|reply
(0) - ie: HokeyPokey would be a line of kids standing in a certain direction - you put your north foot in, you take your north foot out, you put your south foot in.. etc
[+] [-] irrational|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZetaZero|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aidenn0|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hidelooktropic|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amanj41|3 years ago|reply
a) The user must be wearing the anklet at all times to initially calibrate but their body is able to determine how much rotation / transposition they have undergone in order to point north. b) After training, one could tell which way is north without ever having to put on the anklet again
[+] [-] kag0|3 years ago|reply
But once users spend a lot of time in an area wearing the device, they have a better ability to navigate that area even with the device removed. I imagine it's similar to how you would be able to navigate your home in low light
[+] [-] ranger207|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loa_in_|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vyrotek|3 years ago|reply
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/06/first-hum...
[+] [-] rkagerer|3 years ago|reply
Firefighters navigating in smoke-filled buildings could benefit from something that helps them maintain an absolute sense of direction, but guessing that might be too hostile an environment.
[+] [-] writeslowly|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HardwareLust|3 years ago|reply