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North Paw

sensebridge.net

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Re: North Paw

#61

Post by godelski »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #6
isaacdl wrote: post #5

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…

> 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 haven't used a device like this, but I don't think this is exaggeration. It is well known in linguistics that speakers of languages that use absolute directions are better at determining where north is. People that use the chime feature on their watches to indicate every hour also tend to have a better sense of time. It is also a successful tool for people trying to lucid dream (the "reality checks" are similar in behavior). We also know that one can become better at spatial directions through practice, which is why it is "common" advice to drive around when moving to a new city without a GPS (until necessary). It helps build that mental map in your head (which often generalizes) and tells your brain to pay attention to other correlating features (e.g. I wouldn't be surprised if this North Paw experiment gave users better sense of time with respect to the sun).

It should be no surprise that as one becomes accustomed to one's own environment and the way they navigate it.

Though I think the cooler question is if we can build a phone/smart-watch app that can do this. Is there a way to vibrate the watch in a northernly direction or something like vibrating when the user turns north (deceptively tricky).

Re: North Paw

#62

Post by lhnz »

I remember when the Apple Watch was first released, this is how I thought directions were going to be implemented. I was so disappointed when it turned out this wasn't the case.

Re: North Paw

#63

Post by noja »

shagie wrote: post #56
isaacdl wrote: post #5

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…

Was it the battery pack? Looking at https://www.adafruit.com/product/5579 and https://www.adafruit.com/product/1201 it should be fairly possible to get to a more reasonable size. As an alternative to the leg, having the vibration as something in the collar might be an alternative. 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 tha…

Arduino fw: https://sensebridge.net/projects/northpaw/northpaw-downloads...

Re: North Paw

#64

Post by TrueGeek »

shagie wrote: post #56
isaacdl wrote: post #5

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…

Was it the battery pack? Looking at https://www.adafruit.com/product/5579 and https://www.adafruit.com/product/1201 it should be fairly possible to get to a more reasonable size. As an alternative to the leg, having the vibration as something in the collar might be an alternative. 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 tha…

I ride a bike with a Garmin radar detector that tells me when a car is behind me. Adding a vibration motor to it would be neat.

Re: North Paw

#65

Post by ok_dad »

BeefWellington wrote: post #35

Along these lines is an audio compass app I came across when looking for good visually impaired navigation tools: https://staging.f-droid.org/en/packages/cz.harvie.northdog/ 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…

> dulling your audial sensitivity to the area around you

Many headphones have a feature where they pass-thru the external audio, so perhaps you could use that with this as an audio overlay.

Re: North Paw

#66

Post by kelnos »

ok_dad wrote: post #23
googlryas wrote: post #3

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…

Whoa, this is really cool!

> For ships, you get an idea for what direction the bow and stern are moving

I wouldn't've thought of this, but of course that's critical to know on a ship. And it's certainly something outside of standard human experience, since we're small enough in that dimension to not have to worry about the difference in movement between our front and rear sides. The fact that you were able to gain an intuitive feel for this highlights how adaptable the human brain is.

Re: North Paw

#67

Post by ok_dad »

staplung wrote: post #31

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…

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.

Re: North Paw

#68

Post by ehxor »

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.

Re: North Paw

#69

Post by stonemetal12 »

dfc wrote: post #25
idiotsecant wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am pretty sure by "how far from" he meant the delta of magnetic north to heading angle. Since an Apple watch doesn't have the ability to vibrate any where except the watch body it can't "point" at magnetic north like the North paw does, it would have to indicate magnetic north some other way.

Re: North Paw

#70

Post by ranger207 »

amanj41 wrote: post #42

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

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
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