I don't know about you, but I am terrible at finding directions or knowing my way around.
If I go into a bathroom at an event and I haven't been at that location before.
I'll come out and have no clue which way I turned to get in there.
It's pretty embarrassingly bad. So I built a device to see if I could train
myself to know where north is at all times.
I've known people who are seemingly good at finding directions.
They just have an intuitive sense of knowing where they are at all times.
They can tell you, Oh yeah, north's that way. How did you know that?
They just know, I've also known people who have taken special training,
whether this is scouts or through the military and they can orient themselves a lot better
than I can. They pay attention to landmarks.
They look for the position of the sun, whatever it might be and they do it so fast that it
looks natural.
Also in 2010 Dr Susan Berry, a neuroscientist and biologist had her husband
constructor a device that would help her find directions a little better.
She reported to be terrible at finding directions just like me.
And after wearing this device for about two weeks, she was able to orient herself a little
better. She could find cardinal directions.
This device was a hat. Her husband made her a hat that had some
electronics built in that would vibrate. It would buzz whenever she was facing north and
the idea the story goes, she would come to expect that buzz from the hat whenever she was
facing north. Now in her article, she claims that she started
to pay attention more to the little things like sun and landmarks,
like certain buildings or road signs.
This is probably what happened after wearing this device.
She got a little better at noticing these things and it's kind of what I expect to happen.
But things get weird.
There is this sense known as magneto reception that allows for many animals
to detect the magnetic fields of the earth and they use it to navigate.
That's how many birds and fish migrate and they know their way around intrinsically humans
apparently do not have magneto reception.
Scientists have discovered that there's something in our eyes that responds to changes
in magnetic fields, which means that we might at one point have had magneto reception.
But our brains currently do not seem to do anything with this information.
That being said, I would like to ask the question, can we train ourselves to be better
at finding directions through passive means. So I'm going to run a little experiment.
I'm going to recreate what dr barry had done. Make a device that buzzes whenever I face north
and wear it for two weeks to see what happens. But to do all of this,
We have to build something J designed this case for me using fusion 360.
He left a few holes so I could attach straps and a lanyard and some holes on the side so I
can insert a USB cable and have access to a switch to turn the device on and off to save on
batteries from there. It was time to three D.
Print it. Once done I had to assemble everything.
There was a good bit of cleaning up the case and making sure everything fit.
I sorted out the electronics and hot glued everything inside the case that's probably good
enough to wear for two weeks. Then I screwed the lid onto the case and
finally I attached a strap for my chest and a lanyard to go around my neck to keep the case
and all the electronics flush against my body thanks to the holes on the side.
I could turn the device on and off using a switch.
It required some digging in there with some tweezers though.
The other side had a hole to connect a USB cable so I could program the Arduino.
Once I have all the electronics inside the enclosure, I need to calibrate the magnetometer.
This includes running a special program on the Arduino and running this motion sensor
calibration tool and then moving the board in a bunch of different directions while keeping it
away from things like permanent magnets and other electronics like my laptop.
I have a separate video that goes into the theory and why you would want to do this along
with how you perform this calibration. Feel free to check that out if you would like
to know more. Yeah.
Day one of wearing the device, it definitely works.
If I face north, it buzzes the good news is that it doesn't buzz all the time.
I'm sure I will get some funky looks from neighbors but I can always tuck it under my
shirt if I need to.
This is day three of wearing the device and at this point I have definitely determined that
when I face the back of my house this way it will trigger the device and I get a nice buzz
on my chest.
The other thing I've noticed is that if I lean forward or lean to the side,
sometimes it will result in a false positive and it will start buzzing.
This is because I don't have tilt compensation on the device.
I don't have an accelerometer on there. So if I ever wanted to sell this or turn it
into a product that is something I would probably add.
Okay day five of wearing what I've been calling project jochen which is named after the
japanese buddhism identification of the north star.
What I've noticed is that I'm not really getting an intuitive sense of where north is
rather every time the device goes off my body in particular my eyes,
they take a snapshot of everything I see around me.
Hopefully what that's doing is training a model to be a little more cognizant of where I am in
the direction I'm facing to figure out where north is.
The other thing is that anybody I've talked to when I say,
oh I'm bad at directions, Why do you need this device?
Oh, why don't you just look at the sun to see where you're facing?
I'm like, okay, that's great. I never really had an intuitive sense of that.
It's early afternoon, about 3:30 p.m. The sun is over there.
I know it rises in the east and sets in the west, so I think that's west.
Question mark.
What I'm noticing with this device, however, is that if I'm outside and I can see the sun.
Obviously whenever it goes off, I've been paying attention to where the sun is in
relation to my body. So I know that the sun rises in the east and in
the morning when this device goes off the sun and keep in mind I'm in the Northern Hemisphere
and it's late spring, early summer. The sun is a little bit in front of where my
right arm is, it travels up a little bit behind my head and then sets
over my left arm or a little bit in front of my left arm.
And I've been paying attention to that. So now that I know that it's about 3 30 if I
position the sun a little bit behind my left shoulder, I know that I'm facing north
and this has been helping me with directions, at least in relation to the sun because I'm
positioning it with my body rather than trying to figure out the actual cardinal direction.
Day nine of wearing this thing.
I am discovering that it is terrible to drive while wearing it and that's because of the
fairest metals and probably more than one permanent magnet in my car.
These cause hard and soft iron distortions that completely throw off the readings on the
magnetometer. And this lines up with what I'm seeing whenever
I use the compass on my cell phone, which means that if I wanted to use it while driving,
I would need to recalibrate the magnetometer every time I got in the car and then
recalibrate it every time I got out. So I'm just going to forget about wearing it
while trying to drive.
It's day 15 and I've taken off the device. It's time to test.
And first I'm going to test to see if I have a better sense of direction in an area that I'm
familiar with somewhere where I wore the device when I was walking my dog around my
neighborhood This street that I'm on, I used to think it ran north and south.
But because of wearing the device, I now know it's about 15° off and I have to turn to my
left a little bit in order to actually face north.
So that's an interesting discovery is that the device helps me understand directions a little
better when I wore it in areas that I would frequent a whole bunch.
Now let's go to somewhere that I don't know very well.
I'm in an area that I'm not very familiar with. Unlike the first test I don't really have an
intuitive sense of where north is. However I know that I can orient my body and
position the sun which is up there just over my left shoulder because it's about five p.m.
And I'll be facing north when I check this with my smartphone.
Sure enough I was within about 10 degrees. Now obviously this doesn't work very well if I
don't have access to the sun or something like the north star now that we've tried that.
Let's do one more test.
This is the blindfold test my brother here is going to guide me to a random room in this
rental house. I have no idea what the cardinal directions are
and I'm gonna see if I can figure them out. All right here we go.
Alright hand on my shoulder and we're moving I'm not gonna run into a doorway.
Okay I don't know where he's leading me. Oh no what what what what going straight?
Okay going straight to the left. Oh okay that's a door that's a door.
Alright I'm in some room.
I have no idea. Okay so he's gonna spin me around and around.
Oh the problem is I can hear the tv. That gives me a sense here.
Yeah. Close the door la la la la la la la la la la la
la la la la la la la.
Alright we're good. Okay.
Um Wait wait uh
No um that way's north.
All right how we doing, how we doing? I don't think this worked at all.
Okay you wanna try one more room? We're gonna try a second room,
see if it's any better. Let's do it.
And that's a doorway.
Okay we're moving we're moving left left, this is another room.
I have no idea where we are. Okay.
Okay we're turning. Okay close that door so I can hear too many
sounds you know what I'm gonna keep turning for fun.
Okay. Alright I'm gonna keep turning.
Okay we're going we're going stop. Okay. Um uh I still have no
sense of direction innately where this is but I can I think that this is west, hold on.
So this I think this is west and then so that's
north. Yes. So interestingly I was only able to do that
because I was blindfolded and I paid attention to which way I was turning there doesn't seem
to be in any innate sense of direction based on where I'm facing but I was paying
attention to where I turned so that helped.
What did we learn?
It kind of works? I found that whenever I was wearing it and it
would buzz say I was facing north. I would stop and take a survey of my
surroundings, noting the locations of various landmarks, things like trees,
certain houses, road signs and whatnot. Over time I would learn my cardinal directions
and had a better sense of where things were, but only in areas where I wore the device and I
frequented like my house or my neighborhood where I'm out walking my dog.
This allowed me to learn, say a certain street wasn't exactly running north and south.
However, this doesn't seem to offer any better skills over say learning how to use a map.
And unfortunately it did not give me magical
magneto reception powers, which I'm kind of disappointed about.
So for that at least for wearing it for two weeks, I will call it busted.
If you'd like to make your own and try wearing it for longer than two weeks,
I'll make sure there's a link in the description to a tutorial with that happy hacking!