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by paledot
954 days ago
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This is super interesting, and I appreciate the level of detail and thought that went into your response. Some I'm willing to accept, like hot/cold being distinct from pressure being distinct from pain. (Spinal cord injury, for instance, can impair pressure perception in a particular part of the body without affecting hot/cold. And lumping joint pain in with "touch" is just silly.) On the other hand, in the context of the discussion, it's hard to support the argument that you can count each colour channel separately just because the biological mechanics differ. You can't actually triple the amount of human-perceptable information by going from a monochrome to full colour display. The point remains that we've plucked the low-hanging fruit when it comes to high-bandwidth human senses (or meta-senses if you insist on being pedantic). No one will buy a PUI (pain user interface). |
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Other types of interfaces do exist, for example ive worked with vibration motor arrays placed on the skin for various purposes such as assisting in guiding the arm of a patient to target a specific point (vibrate on side closest to target) etc. We also worked with pads of electrical patches that pass small currents through the skin to produce a distinct sensation, like pain but barely at the threshold of being noticable. These were used for first responders, placed along the side of the torso underneath the clothes with flat profile, allowing them to have handsfree silent communication with low bandwidth. Something like "up up left left" being pre-agreed to mean leave the structure now etc. Another fun one I wanted to mention is in-mouth joysticks controlled with the tongue for quadreplegic patients to allow them to move a wheelchair or robot arm to regain some small independance (might seem like it would be uselessly hard to achieve anything with an arm controlled that way but the emotional impact of independance can't be understated for such people, even a simple task can be very meaningful)
They won't be as good as screens or audio unfortunately. But they can exist. Even braille screens and keyboards exist as a nice product and are reasonably high bandwidth.