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?
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.
> 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!
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?