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Engineering Innovation

A project log for 3D Haptic Vest for Visually Impaired and Gamers

This project's goal was to make a vest that a visually impaired or gamer could use when moving around in their environment(real or virtual).

sean-bensonSean Benson 09/17/2014 at 16:560 Comments

To my knowledge a vest like this has not been done for the visually impaired. My vest has 48 vibration motors which is a whole lot more compared to other gaming vests.

I also use an innovative way of suppressing the transfer of vibrations from motor to motor. I use a neoprene vest with neoprene pads on which the motors are mounted. This reduces the vibration transfer between motors and also reduces the transfer of vibrations between the wires and the motors.

Fast Fournier Transforms (FFT) on the Raspberry Pi:  I used Python to make calls to multiple libraries (such as NumPy, PyAudio, PySerial) to implement FFT 56 times per second at sample rates of 14,400 Hz from the audio stream.  This was unusual since other people using the Raspberry Pi without the GPU could only get the FFT to 5 times per second.  But what was extra special was the process only took about 60% of the computing power. This gave me really good response time with no noticeable lag.  Game playing wearing the vest is awesome!  

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