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.
North Paw
21–30 of 142 posts
Re: North Paw
#22I 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
Re: North Paw
#23I 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!
Re: North Paw
#24Would 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.
Re: North Paw
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if any smart watch apps can reliably achieve something similar. I looked briefly for an Apple watch app that did it but no luck.
It seems like it would be trivial to write an app that would vibrate the watch every once in a while, with the frequency of vibration inversely proportional to how far you were from magnetic north, but this would no doubt be a pretty big battery drain.
I don't think it is a question of how far you are from magnetic north. The north paw device helped people identify where magnetic north is relative to your current heading.
Re: North Paw
#26I 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 s…
Some places have geographic features that make the cardinals easy. Like in Denver, the mountains are always west.
Re: North Paw
#27I wonder if it'd be possible to build a more compact and power efficient version of this using electrostatics on a flexible PCB
Re: North Paw
#28Some similar projects:
- 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-belt-vibrates-northward-wearablewednesday/
- https://makeitbreakitfixit.com/2016/06/22/haptic-compass-band-revisited/Re: North Paw
#29I made a belt that did this while I was in college. Some pics: https://imgur.com/a/FNbtdEO
Much better design and you don't look like a criminal that has to wear a lo-jack.
Re: North Paw
#30It looks like an electronic shackle offenders under house arrest get