So, while we pass the time waiting for the next prototype, actually the beta of the pre-production units, to be completed here are a few bits on what exactly Haptics are.

Easiest and most straight forward, the wikipedia entry on the subject. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haptic_technology

While the article is informative, it doesn't really expand on our focus.  Really what we're doing isn't so much sensory replacement or virutalization, but actual sensory enhancement.  This is the part where Tim rolls his eyes and I dig out my soapbox, so hold on true believers, let's get to it.

The largest organ you have is your skin.  Your skin has essentially reserved a large portion of your brain for sensory information you largely ignore anyway.  Rustling of clothing against skin, pressure of chair-on-butt and that sort of thing is relayed up to this insanely complex array of neurons, processed thoroughly and promptly disregarded by the concious mind.  The skin is actually relaying a very complex series of signals with a reasonable resolution and localization of data, but we just don't care.  Once the data is processed, we are aware of it in essentially a summary view.

Very little actual surface area of the skin is conciously monitored; fingertips, face etc. So what good does all that do us?  It gives us a nice big data pipe up the brainstem into (processing ability-wise) big chunk o' gray matter that's already programmed to evaluate and transform sensory data into a summary that we only notice peripherally.  So, it might be possible to slip something beyond normal touch data in there.  It might be possible to slip sensory data in that the brain's never seen before and use the skin (and attached nerves etc) as a way to use that big chunk o' gray matter to process it into the edge of our conciousness.  Now that sounds cool enough on it's own, but when you factor in the brain's ability to 'remap' parts of itself to respond to changing stimuli, we get an even more interesting phenomenon.

The touch-based, or haptic, feedback is interpreted as an entirely new sense.  With the Haptic Guide technology we set beyond just supplementing the senses with an new absolute magnetic sense of direction (which, while certainly amazing in it's own right, is a solved problem) and add a synthsized sense of direction, combining GPS and magnetometry.  In the absence of GPS or other directional data the belt can and does act as a fairly normal haptic compass, providing a sense of the direction that is North.  Combined with both an onboard microcontroller and the power of modern smartphones, we can add turn-by-turn navigation without adding the 'overhead' of having to use the bandwidth of a sense people are acustomed using to observe thier environment(s).

Let me give you an example.  If I were visiting, say, London England (I live in western Canada, so that's not something I get to do often) and wanted to find my way from a hotel at Russel Square to Trafalgar Square, I pop out my phone, select my destination and off I go.  Nothing revolutionary there, just about any GPS-enable device can do that much.  The really great thing about the Haptic Guide is that once I've chosen my destination, I stuff my phone back into my pocket and follow the silent feedback of my Haptic Guide belt.  This means that I can enjoy the walk for starters, but also means that since I'm not staring at my GPS device I can keep aware of my environment so that I don't get run over by that taxi zooming past the British Museum as I cross the street.  If this seems like an awfully specific example, it's because Tim and I spent a few days in England together presenting this very technology to the folks at Nokia during the Push N900 contest and similar situations were common.

I don't mean to say that drivers in London are in any way more careless than those we encounter in Canada, it's just that they drive on the other side of the road.  30+ years of experience telling me what direction to look when crossing the street served only to set me up for disaster.  I'm certainly not the most observant of tourists, but having my eyes and ears free (as well as having Tim's eyes and ears free) kept me from any significant harm.  If I'd been staring at my GPS the whole trip, not only would I have been more likely to become a traffic statistic, I would also have missed the architectural wonders and oddities of London.  The fact that the smartphone we were using for the Haptic Guide also happend to pack a 5 megapixel camera, a full-feature linux operating system and everything but the kitchen sink (which I wouldn't put past Nokia finding a way to cram in there in a future revision) made for a fantastic experience.

And that, Ladies and Gentlemen is why I love Haptics.