Good article.
I can't help but wonder why way-finding / path-finding vibrational orienteering vests aren't a thing yet.
You could vibratory signal a path in complete darkness, indicate obstacles and threats or directions to supply caches etc.
I can't help but wonder why way-finding / path-finding vibrational orienteering vests aren't a thing yet.
You could vibratory signal a path in complete darkness, indicate obstacles and threats or directions to supply caches etc.
ah seems to be a product now: https://point-iot.eu/success-story/navibelt/
There are cultures whose language grammar depends on all directions being relative to cardinal points. Even three-year-olds never get it wrong.
What sensors would this vest use to figure out where you are and where the obstacles and threats around you are?
You are not going to get direction from GPS sadly. You could have it from differential GPS but I can’t imagine a way how to do mount a long fixed baseline comfortably on a vest.
Add a couple of grams more for GPS, and you can have it click when your head points to where you parked your jeep or tent. To maintain battery life, you turn on the GPS only once every 5 minutes, and rely on the compass for real-time orientation.
(This might not be so useful for soldiers, because they have mostly long since wrecked their hearing. Maybe use barely perceptible electric shocks, for mil application.)
After a very short time, the clicks etc. fade from conscious perception, and you just know your directions at all times.
Also, for your task, you’d need the precise location of your subject, or highly reliable obstacle detection (including “there’s nothing, not even a good path” obstacles), probably both. The latter sort-of works for self-driving cars, but their computers are rather big to carry around, and they can declare anything “clearly not a road” as “obstacle”. They don’t have to recognize a small footpath across a mountain ridge, or alongside a river.
When those systems and their backups fail you're into like, "hide and wait for help" or even straight up sere training shit, because the entire thing that makes you a powerful force rather than just a guy with a gun is gone. Knowing which way is north is not gonna solve your problem at that point. Knowing "which way to the supply cache" might but if that piece of tech is still working probably so is your normal radio and gps.
Anything that burns up batteries driving a display is a huge burden.
Anything that destroys night vision is a huge burden.
So, anything that provides them the most essential bits of combat information (e.g. that is the direction back to base) without need to look at it, and using only microwatts, is a huge benefit.
Soldiers have it even worse, carrying, literally, pounds of batteries, sometimes tens of. Anything that works without needing to produce power-burning, night-vision destroying light they have to look at, and weighing them down, is a huge benefit.
Otherwise, transflective LCDs with red backlight (rods aren't sensitive to red light).
For information more detailed than can be delivered by ambient channels, of course, you need to get it some other way. But audio will often be better than needing to focus on a little display, even if with red backlight.