Navigating your way through an unfamiliar city can be challenging and stressful, especially when you’re visually impaired. This little handheld device from Yale postdoctorate engineer associate Adam Spiers shifts it shape to point you in the right direction so even if you can’t see, you can get accurate directions to your destination.

The current version of Animotus is connected wirelessly to the location sensors on your clothing that work with other sensors mounted on the walls of your surroundings. In the future, it will connect to your smartphone for real-world guidance. It’s a haptic device unlike any other – rather than relying on vibrations like most, you simply hold it in your hand and feel as the top part pivots to lead you.

Other sight-impaired assistive devices rely on sound to help navigate, which can be a problem since cities are generally noisy already and hearing their surroundings is a big part of getting around for visually impaired people. Spiers recently supplied the device for an interactive play based on an 1884 book by Edwin A. Abbott called Flatland. Audience members became participants by holding onto an Animotus which led them, in complete darkness, around the “stage,” which was actually the inside of a church.

Infrared cameras showed the audience members making their way through the set at speeds nearly as fast as walking in a brightly lit space. At the end of the performance, participants liked the navigation devices so much they wanted to keep them. Spiers says the Animotus is a long way from being produced commercially, but he’s encouraged by the positive response so far. He envisions the device as someday being a simple way for both sighted and visually impaired people to navigate without having to constantly pay attention to a smartphone’s directions.

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The quest to create the perfect virtual reality movement control has led to some pretty interesting ideas. The 3DRudder is another cool gadget that could help you get around in video games, but unlike most others we’ve seen, this one lets you sit down while you navigate the virtual world.

3DRudder looks a lot like the exercise balance boards that you stand on to improve core strength. But to use it, you sit in a chair and put one foot on either side of center. The motions are fairly intuitive: you tilt forward to move forward, back to move back, and left or right to move in either direction.

The balance board-type controller also lets you rotate your feet to look all around you in  the game environment. It more or less takes over the movement function of your keyboard or game controller to free up your hands for different aspects of the game. And when you’re trying to run through a sniper-infested minefield while simultaneously picking off baddies, this can make a huge difference in the way you game.

A controller that uses your feet and frees your hands up for other actions would probably be most obviously beneficial in a first-person shooter game. But Oculus Rift and other VR headsets are poised to make it almost a necessity to traverse virtual worlds easily, so products like 3DRudder could give the experience a little more realism than you would get from using a hand-held controller for all of your actions.

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Navigating an urban landscape is difficult enough, but doing it without the benefit of sight is confusing and can be dangerous. Microsoft teamed up with research group Future Cities Catapult to create a headset that creates a multi-layered soundscape to help those with visual impairments get around. The Cities Unlocked project uses a smartphone and bone conduction sound to provide information about the wearer’s surroundings.

The behind-the-head headset features two small nodes that fit just in front of each ear to transmit sound through the wearer’s bones. This type of sound delivery is more efficient than sounds that travel through the air, and the technology allows the wearer to hear both the headset’s cues and the ambient noises around them.

Each headset is custom made using Microsoft’s Kinect camera. The camera scans the wearer’s head to determine the precise location of the wearer’s ear canals. The nodes are designed to fit in front of the ear canals to bypass the eardrums altogether. This precise positioning allows the headset to create noises that seem to come from a certain direction. If a wearer is headed in the wrong direction, the headset can create a sound coming from the correct direction which cues the wearer to turn that way.

The headset can name nearby landmarks, buildings, and businesses to help the wearer keep their bearings. It is connected to a smartphone via Bluetooth and relies on information from location and navigation services. Before setting out, a wearer can program in a route and the headset will guide them to the location using verbal directions and sound cues.

Part of the project’s vision is to place information beacons in strategic locations throughout urban areas. These beacons would provide valuable information about transportation schedules and other helpful mobility tips.

The initiative is aimed not only at people who are commuting to and from work; it is meant to help tourists and those who are new to a city. Getting around a new city with sight loss is a huge and scary undertaking, but the help provided by the Cities Unlocked project could help visually impaired people attain a whole new level of confidence and independence.

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Dhairya Dand, a researcher at MIT’s Media Lab, thinks that we rely on our smartphones so much that we’re missing the world around us. We use our phones to navigate, to find new places, and even to locate our friends. He’s designed an electronic shoe insole that gives you little haptic signals to guide you so that you can free up your hands from your smartphone and actually look around you as you wander.

SuperShoes are, of course, paired with a smartphone app – that’s probably unavoidable. Users plug their favorite destinations and interests into the online ShoeCentral platform, giving the insoles some insight into where you might like to be guided. When you’re out walking, the SuperShoes will give your feet a little tickle to alert you to a suggested destination. The shoe insole also links up with your calendar and to-do list, reminding you when to do certain tasks and sending you on shortcuts when you’re running late.

The most seemingly useful aspect of the shoes are as a navigation tool. Before you start out, you program your destination on the smartphone app. As you walk, the shoes tickle your left or right foot to tell you which way to turn. No more staring at the map on your phone or listening to a robotic voice telling you which way to go – just a set of tickly feet helping you find your way.

The SuperShoes project would undoubtedly be helpful in everyday life, but Dand doesn’t plan to turn them into a consumer product. His goal was simply to create a tech product that wasn’t as invasive as those which already rule our every waking moment, but is just as useful.

(via: Gizmag)

The post SmartyShoes: Haptic Insoles Guide Your Steps + Schedule first appeared on Gajitz.

Whiskers that adorn the faces of some mammals aren’t there just to add to the animals’ cuteness. They are highly sensitive tactile appendages that help the animals find their way around and keep their balance. A team of scientists at UC Berkeley, led by professor Ali Javey, are now working on robotic whiskers that can be used on future generations of robots and in advanced human/robot interfaces. Robots equipped with the highly sensitive whiskers will be able to find their way around their environments more easily thanks to the mammalian-inspired appendages.

The whiskers developed by the team can detect pressure as minimal as one pascal – or about the amount of force a dollar bill exerts on a table it is sitting on. Their sensitivity is about ten times that of previous generations of similar robotic whiskers. Made of carbon nanotubes and silver nanoparticles, the whiskers are inexpensive and easy to produce. They are flexible and lightweight, so they wouldn’t add much bulk to robots but would greatly increase their ability to move around unassisted.

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