
Ping Stick - l1n
http://sensitiveresearch.com/Ping%20stick/
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scotist
It's not clear that this tool proves or even suggests anything at all about
the relationship of mind and body. At best it indicates something about how
our "sensorium" operates, but many philosophers would be seriously hesitant to
equate our sensory awareness of our spatial surroundings with the mind. After
all, animals have such a sensorium, but it's debatable whether they have mind
in the sense(s) that philosophers, mystics, zen masters, or poets mean it.

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dahart
You might want to try it first. This language is pretty close to what the
people who can echo locate by clicking their tongues say.

As for whether there's a philosophical link between the senses and the mind, I
think it would be really weird for any philosopher to not link them. All the
mind has is what the senses give it, they _completely_ intertwined.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_perception](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_perception)

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dahart
This is a cool project, it'd be fun to make, and I'd bet enlightening to walk
around with your eyes closed for a while.

There are a few things I'm sure I'd have done differently, and I'm not
criticizing, I'm saying mine might have come out worse the first time. But I'm
curious if anyone who's tried it can speak to the choices.

The case seems huge, the components could definitely fit into a tube half the
diameter. Maybe it'd just take more time to pack, but maybe a large tube is
actually beneficial for feeling the vibrations?

I'm sure I'd have tried audio over vibration, seems like you can get a much
better range with less battery power. But vibration is perhaps less annoying
to use for longer periods of time, or just more tactile?

And the PING sensor in my experience is extremely, surprisingly narrow. It
feels like real life ray tracing. I've been curious about, but too busy to buy
& play with, the infrared proximity sensors - I'm wondering if they have a
somewhat wider spread but could still work here? Anyone know?

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fab13n
> I'm sure I'd have tried audio over vibration

After vision, audition is your main way to perceive the world around you; you
probably don't want to interfere with that sense. My guess is, if you consider
proposing such a device to blind people, sound feedback would be an instant
deal-breaker.

> the PING sensor in my experience is extremely, surprisingly narrow.

It would be very interesting to try and encode a wider sensing in finer ways:
more buzzers, different "tones" of vibration... giving simultaneously
information about what's exactly in front of the stick, and what the wider
surroundings are like. I wonder what kinds of encodings are easiest to learn.

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dahart
> My guess is, if you consider proposing such a device to blind people, sound
> feedback would be an instant deal-breaker.

I think you're right if the audio takes over the environment. Beeping and
buzzing would be especially irritating. But OTOH, echo location is audible,
and it's the main way that some blind people "see", so there's already
evidence that audio is not a deal-breaker, or doesn't have to be.

> It would be very interesting to try and encode a wider sensing in finer
> ways: more buzzers, different "tones" of vibration... giving simultaneously
> information about what's exactly in front of the stick, and what the wider
> surroundings are like. I wonder what kinds of encodings are easiest to
> learn.

I agree completely. If you think about echo location, the source sound, a
tongue click or whatever, has a wide spread. The sound that goes out echoes
off everything nearby, it's not just a point-sample of distance. Furthermore,
the echo that comes back has all kinds of texture to it, and blind people
often talk about how they can hear the shape and material of things. They're
getting multi-dimensional information from the echoes, not just a guess of how
far away something is. They get amplitude and reverb/decay and stereo to work
with, just for a start. It would indeed be very interesting to explore how a
sensor device could achieve this same subtlety and multi-dimensionality!

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halotrope
This would be even more interesting if you had a hat with a ring of 4 of these
sensors and vibrators. This way you could even "see" whats behind and next to
you.

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conkrete
That would be really interesting, although for people without sight I think
being able to aim the device would be very important.

perhaps a glove with a sensor on each finger once the technology catches up.

What if you had sensors like these all over your body. Do you think the body
would hit some kind of sensory overload and it would cease to be useful?

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veenified
Video demonstration is available for download here:
[http://sensitiveresearch.com/Ping%20stick/images/wall,%20edg...](http://sensitiveresearch.com/Ping%20stick/images/wall,%20edge%20emphasis.mov)

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foota
Seems like it could make a useful aid to people with vision impairment?

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shitloadofbooks
That product already exists, a blind friend of mine has one and freaks out his
neighbours with it.

I was visiting him one day and he'd used it for a walk around around the block
and his neighbour asked him how he "knew where all the cars where" and he
responded "well, I ring Mary down the road and she describes the entire block
to me and then I memorize it."

This guy nodded his head as if that made sense and left and then my friend
promptly burst into laughter and showed me his secret.

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jakobegger
Do you have a link to this product?

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arde
This would be a great phone app.

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valine
Especially for phones with dual cameras and haptics.

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gojomo
What if in addition to 'distance' there were 3 more vibratory channels: red,
green, blue?

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unwind
How should that work? Three color-filtered light sensors and A/D converters on
the Ardunino? With optics to get some sense of where the sensors are
"looking"? Or a full-blown video camera? But that's not very Arduino-friendly,
and synthesizing three numbers from a whole image seems hard.

In general, I think the appeal of this solution is its simplicity, it could be
implemented on something even smaller than the Arduino. Adding video
processing would be a move in the opposite direction, I think.

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gojomo
To me, the appeal of this device (and potential variants) is all in the new
perceptive capabilities it grants the user – independent of any implementation
details.

So to send color, I'd say sure, add a cheap video camera and whatever
optics/CPU/software that's necessary to read the color, out along the same
line for which the distance is being measured.

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daodedickinson
I accidentally clicked on the up arrow for this article. Then I decided to
check the article to see if it was worth an up vote anyway.

>This page uses a plugin that is not supported

I guess my Chrome doesn't do .mov files in embed tags.

Well anyway, as far as embodied cognition goes, I believe that, in a certain
sense, a star is part of my body while I'm looking at it. Post-it notes are
part of our memory.

Seems interesting. Reminds me of the glasses that flip your vision upside down
until your brain flips it back right side up and then when you take the
glasses off you see upside down with no glasses. And also of blind people
echolocating.

