Chips of rare-earth magnet epoxied to your fingernails let you sense the magnetic fields around you.
A gadget mounted in your helmet could click softly as your head turns past cardinal points. You wouldn't even notice, consciously, but you would always know what direction you were facing.
Screens that change as they load, notifications every second, layout shifts, animations that serve no purpose, and more. It's driving me nuts to be honest.
I think there really is a space for computing that just exists around us, and interacts with the environment in ways you don't have to actively look at. As a plus, you'll save cycles for what you actually want to compute if you don't have to draw everything on a screen on top of 2000 layers of abstraction.
The example you give is exactly what I'm talking about: You already know which direction you're facing, if you take the time to learn how to notice your own internal information. You already have magnetic sensors in your head.
(E.g. https://theconversation.com/new-evidence-for-a-human-magneti... )
I've found that it's relatively easy to develop one's capabilities to be able to do things like: always know what time it is, always know where you are and your orientation, remember things, etc.
I think it would be a shame to replace human faculties with machines, like using a wheelchair even though your legs work fine and then after awhile your legs atrophy and are no longer fine, y'know? I worry that we are doing that to our brains.
Then you can turn off the clicks at cardinal points, and leave only the "that way to my campsite" click.
Chips of rare-earth magnet epoxied to your fingernails let you sense the magnetic fields around you.
A gadget mounted in your helmet could click softly as your head turns past cardinal points.
It would have a magnetic sensor to sample 3D orientation now and again (maybe per second), an inertial-platform chip for lower-powered moment-to-moment tracking and dead reckoning, and power up a GPS once in a while to get absolute position, correct the compass heading, and rebase the inertial platform. It would have a distinguished click for when you face the next way point, or your campsite.
I am partial to the idea of weak electric shocks instead of audio. But that might be a harder sell. People usually talk about shaker motors, but that is a recipe for needing lots of battery. I would rather the whole system weigh less than an AA cell, and run for weeks on a charge or button cell.
About the fingernail magnets, I recall stories about people who implanted magnets in their fingertips. It struck me as kind of dumb, vs gluing, although maybe the more nerve endings would make them more sensitive. The description was that near AC motors and transformers they could feel a vibration, and could tell whether metals were ferrous by touch. I expect you could get a sense of how conductive metal is by wiggling the magnet near it.
Another interesting story is a fellow (Danish, I believe?) who calls himself a cyborg because he was born (completely?) colorblind but attached an antenna to his head that allows him to hear a tone that changes depending on the color in front of him. At some point he began to hear these color-sounds in his dreams as well.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09265...
Your body already feels magnetic fields around you... you have iron in your blood.
It’s still a debate how animals sense the earths magnetic field. However, all theories rely on special adaptions and not on the extremely weak magnetic properties of blood.
There are languages where grammar requires all directions are absolute, and even three-year-olds speaking those languages never get them wrong. I don't know of any studies to show they really are referenced to magnetic north, or are misled by artificial magnetic fields.
There is probably an easy PhD in showing such an effect.