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As you battle your way into the great outdoors on a hike or camping excursion, you need both hands free for pushing away branches, or fighting off wildlife — not handling a compass. So to guarantee you’re still headed in the right direction, this vibrating compass will always keep you aware of true north, without requiring you to stare at a needle.
The anklet uses a set of eight vibrating pager motors equally spaced around your leg to subtly indicate which direction is north. And eventually your body will adapt and tune out the vibrations, giving you your own spidey-sense of which direction to go. But be forewarned: the North Paw comes all assembly required, so in addition to knowing how to tackle mother nature, you’re going to need to know how to solder as well.
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Strap this vibrating compass to your crotch and you wont know whether your coming or going
An easy way to look like you have an ASBO!
What if it rotates around your ankle slightly and you end up north west instead of north?
Magnetic north, not true north.
http://www.gradman.com/hapticcompass the belt version is good too and less cumbersome I would imagine
i think this is the one i remember. i’ve seen a whole documentary on something similar. the guy lived in a small village and wore the thing for quite an extended period. can’t remember where/when i saw it though. would be interesting to see again.
I think that was a BBC Documentary about Senses.
after a bit more googleing… i was thinking of this:
BBC One made a documentary on feelSpace as part of the “Seeing is Believing” episode, broadcast on 8 Jan 2011.
via: http://feelspace.cogsci.uni-osnabrueck.de/
unfortunately haven’t found a stream-able version yet.
http://documentarystorm.com/horizon-is-seeing-believing/
I have gone my whole life ignorant of which way is North. It’s going just fine.
What if you don’t want to go north? But SSW? or SSE?
Seems like it’d be a whole helluva lot harder and take longer to constantly work out in your brain and body at what precise angle you need to be moving against the vibrations rather than just having a look at your wrist or handheld every few mins.
Also – why would you want to EVER haul another battery around the woods when you smartphone already has a compass and GPS?
The more I think about the practicalities of this the less I like it…
i think the point is that it becomes second nature / subconscious, a “spidey sense” as noted in the article. it’s basically developing another sense which i think is extremely interesting. bit like the body hacking stuff. clearly this tech is in its infancy.
Fair point – but I’m still not sure that it’s not a solution looking for a problem….
I’ve spent my entire life outdoors. If you can see the sun, moss on trees or have a general idea where you are going you already have that spidey sense built in. Anyone who would wear this thing long enough to develop a sixth sense with it would have already developed the other skills necessary to navigate without a compass.
Still not convinced…
Its clever tech, but I genuinely can’t think of a use for this. In the wild, a compass on its own is useless. You need a map, and a way to take a bearing in order to get somewhere. A £10 Silva compass is great for this job – it weighs about 40 grams and it still works in the rain, when you’re knee deep in mud and without batteries. If I want to know which way North ROUGHLY is, I can look for the sun, at the moss on trees (grows more on the south side), or a variety of other visual cues.
Save your money, just observe the locals. If you’re increasingly hearing stuff like “Will e’ ‘eck as like” or “By gum, thee don’t sweat much for a fat lass do thee”, then your heading north. If on the other hand you start hearing “G and T Peregrin?” or “One simply must try these Hors d’oeuvre”, you’re heading south.