According to Lynette Jones, a senior research scientist in MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering, your skin has about as many sensory receptors as your eyeballs, making it a hugely underutilised medium for receiving information. The problem with skin, though, is that those receptors are spread out over 1.8 square metres, and we don't currently have a very good idea of how sensitive a given patch of epidermis is going to be. We can feel a phone vibrating through our pants, sure. But could we tell if it was buzzing in a particular pattern? Or just vibrating its left side, as opposed to the right? These are the questions Jones is trying to answer, with an eye towards next-gen devices that don't just pump info into our eyes and ears, but directly onto our hides, too.
Jones' most recent work focuses on dense haptic displays, and how they might be able to give us spatial cues about the world around us. Think of something like a back brace that could guide you noiselessly through a corn maze, just by buzzing. Recently, Jones built a crude version of that general concept -- a wearable array, decked out with a series of motors and a handful of accelerometers for measuring how those motors' vibrations traveled through the skin -- and tested it out on eight subjects.
By: Kyle Vanhemert,
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via Wired.co.uk
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-07/17/future-of-vibrating-devices
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