Or you could just follow your nose...
North Paw
41–50 of 142 posts
Re: North Paw
#42Can 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
Re: North Paw
#43Earlier 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.
Thinking about it the ankle is a pretty clever Place. My wrists are very often in different orientations to my body, but my ankles are more or less always in line with the way I'm facing.
Belt is better still by the same arc of reason.
Re: North Paw
#44Cool idea, but at that price point I'd expect a smart watch or band rather than a bulky house-arrest ankle monitor.
Re: North Paw
#45I 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…
> 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 have what you might describe as a "spidey sense" about whether a photo depicting a North American coastal scene is on the Atlantic, the Pacific, or something else like Lake Erie. You might have this feeling also.
I suspect it comes from an innate, unconscious comprehension of the highlights and the shadows (since the sun will typically be in the south). And I don't mean the obvious shadows but even the subtle ones.
With practice and perhaps assistance, e.g. North Paw, one could learn to harness the association between light and direction anywhere, not just near huge bodies of water of known direction.
Re: North Paw
#46Earlier 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.
Thinking about it the ankle is a pretty clever Place. My wrists are very often in different orientations to my body, but my ankles are more or less always in line with the way I'm facing.
[deleted]
Re: North Paw
#47Back in 2005 my university built this as a belt and ran several studies on it over the following decade.[1]
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/
Re: North Paw
#48I 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…
> 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?
In the age of people driving through no entry roads and dirt roads because Google Maps showed them that direction, any intuitive sense of direction and navigation is definitely superhuman in my books.
Re: North Paw
#49> 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.
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.
I found several iPhone apps:
- https://apps.apple.com/us/app/talk-compass/id1540530352 (has speech prompts, works while screen is locked)
- https://apps.apple.com/qa/app/talking-compass/id1476144391 (speech prompts did not work for me)
- https://apps.apple.com/de/app/blind-compass/id1546647415 (did not work while screen is locked)Re: North Paw
#50Some 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/
The indentation prevents the adresses being turned into links. Here are links:
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...