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Comment by justusthane | Hacker News Reader

BlindCompass sounds (pun not intended) brilliant! Did you have inspiration for this or was it an original idea? Not any less impressive either way, just curious as someone who’s not at all family with this space.

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I got the idea when I was learning to cross a wide street with a white cane. three lanes in each direction - and it proved to be a challenge because I would veer left or right and frequently get confused and lost. Then I thought a compass would be helpful, but a quick survey of compass apps on iOS showed that they are either visual, or show your heading as a number that can be read by VoiceOver, but it is still not very practical. So I thought that I need to encode heading as something that my brain can easily decipher during crossing the street. I have prior musical training, so that's why I decided to encode heading as a musical interval. This allows my app to communicate with about 10 degrees precision and in practice this is well enough to go on a straight line for long enough to cross the street.

I see someones cane get hit by a car one time causing him to lose orientation and make an almost 90 degree turn in the middle of the road. If the cane is pointed towards or away from traffic people don't even stop anymore.

This was actually long ago but it stuck with me. Just now I realized what perfect analogy for life it is. You move towards something, something interrupts the journey and then you just continue, thinking you are moving in the same direction.

Reminds me of season 5 of person of interest where the super intelligent AI known as "the machine" is giving relative directions to a character using ascending tones for right and descending for left, or something like that. The other character preferred directions in positions on an analog clock.

That was actually season 2! The final episode, I just watched it last week on a rewatch of the show. A lot of it feels pretty prescient right now, although not quite as intense as when the Snowden leaks happened and confirmed all of the government illegality of the show but none of the AI lol.

Haha, this was my immediate thought as well! That was awesome. Root is a badass.

As the sibling says this was the season 2 finale. There were other similar instances.

S02E22 "God Mode": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHIo96yBf70 (3m54s)

Reminded me of this: https://sensebridge.net/projects/northpaw/. Saw this linked on HN somewhere back in 2012 or so.

Reminds me of the train puzzle in Myst!

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