New haptic patch transmits complexity of touch to the skin

(techxplore.com)

14 points | by wglb 4 hours ago ago

4 comments

  • dmazin 2 hours ago

    After the Apple Watch came out, I wanted to build something like this. Of course, an idea being an idea, I didn't.

    Anyway, my idea was this: one drunken night in Berkeley, a neuroscience PhD told me that it was possible to put a patch of electrodes on the back of a blind person. If a camera fed those electrodes, the person would eventually learn to decode that into something like sight.

    That got me thinking about using a similar patch, except on your arm (for convenience), except for audio, and for people who _could_ hear. The idea was that it would amplify what you heard and make you hear it better. We would quickly learn what the signals from the patch mean. In time, maybe, the patch could be used to deliver auditory information that was _not_ merely an amplification of what the person heard.

    I am not 100% sure but I think Meta has been building something similar for a while. Their recent AR glasses showed off a wrist device that could read signals, but I could swear they were also looking into a device that could transmit signals to the skin.

  • zxilly 34 minutes ago

    Come on, when can we use this for games?

    • hengheng 9 minutes ago

      Come on, when can we use this for, uhm

      • zxilly a minute ago

        for you know what