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Military develops vibrating vest for silent comm
It's tough to receive a text message when you're in the middle of a battlefield. Firstly, it’s hard to feel the RAZR in your bulletproof vest vibrating, and then it's tough to type back with those gloves on. The military is looking to solve that problem for soldiers — well, not that problem exactly. They're looking to be able to silently send messages to soldiers via tactile messaging.
They've developed a vibrating vest that can send messages to people via an array of 16 small motors arranged across the back. Sending messages using patterns, it can tell a soldier to stop by vibrating the motors in the four corners or to turn by sending a column of vibrations in the direction they should go. Sure, you can't respond, but silent communication seems to make it worthwhile.
New Scientist, via Medgadget
By karpet at 8:26 PM ON 01/05/07
Leave it to the military to be too good for something we already have. As 'neat' as this project might be, why would it be any better then bone conductive head sets? Those are silent and due to thier nature don't sucumb to ambient noise interference. For that matter, why not just use a led array on the soldiers glove or helmet? Sounds like a reinvention of the wheel. Just wait till a LAN powered shietzu chair massager comes out and hack it, you know it is coming anyway.
Karpet
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karpet:
Leave it to the military to be too good for something we already have. As 'neat' as this project might be, why wou...More »