Haptics rerouting for fun and no profit

nonpolynomial.com

39 pointsqdot763673 comments

Article/project author here, happy to answer any questions you might have about this silliness.

Have you considered rerouting IO to different senses? Such as rumble signals to audio, or for that matter audio to the number pad? Or audio to a little external auxiliary display; rumble to an LED or two?

People can retrain parts of their brain to handle changes to senses in response to physiological change (typically losing a sense) -- it would be fun to see if the same effect worked for gaming.

I've been working with this in VRChat actually, though sometimes it's by accident.

I have a pair of Drop Labs EP-1 shoes (https://droplabs.com/pages/product-overview), which take audio signals and redirect them to transducers in the shoe soles. Since I'm feeding in audio from VRC, it means I can feel people talking in my feet, which is... a very odd sensation.

Especially when they laugh.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com