Skip to content


Introduction to the Pedant

Recently, I’ve been racking up on hobbyist electronics components from Sparkfun. Actually, this has been going on for quite a while, and most of that spending was justified by this project, which currently has the working name of the “pedant” (which is like at least a three-layered pun). I won’t say that it’s my very first foray into building some actual piece of hardware, but it’s probably the biggest and most original hardware project I’ve ever attempted.

I probably won’t be able to sell you on what it is, because it’s actually quite simple and uninteresting in principle. So instead of selling you on the cynical summary of its functionality, I’ll gild the concept with buzz words and try my very best to instill the same kind of enthusiasm I have for this project (which might just be because I haven’t done anything before with e-textiles or other electronics stuff).

The pedant is my foray into augmented reality, hopefully that means that it’s, at least some ways, original. It’s cheap, though actually in retrospect, not nearly as cheap as it should have been. And probably the most interesting aspect is that it skips through the whole perceived evolution of augmented reality from some bulky extremity into something sleek and unobtrusive. That’s not technically untrue, because the actual device will be fairly bulky, but it would exist in an already considerably bulky device (a shoe), so the net effect is that it’s sleek and unobtrusive.

I can’t say I was into that whole augmented reality thing before it was hip and cool. I only got interested in it fairly recently, likely due to somewhat high profile forays by Google and others. In mid-to-late 2008, I had just gotten my iPhone and I was deeply attached to it. At one point, I was on a vacation and at one point there was some arbitrary fact which came into question, at which point I pulled out my glorious first generation iPhone with its pristine anodized aluminium backing and loaded an app which searched an offline copy of all the textual content in the English Wikipedia (a concept which I had become so attached with that I ended up making Offline Wiki for the same reasons). And as the question was settled, the new subject of conversation was how incredible it is to keep all the world’s knowledge in a palm sized device.

But that’s not just an anecdote about the marvels of technology, it’s also a sad tale about how distracting it was. Somehow having access to that information allowed whatever pedantic instincts to prevail, shifting the conversation from a meaningful discussion into an artless digital query. And even forgiving that fact, it was slow and distracting, destroying the asynchronous exchange of ideas by creating this handheld bottleneck. Yes, we got an answer, but at what cost?

And I think that is a beautiful way to frame the argument for augmented reality. That whatever reality we have now is already being corrupted by the influence of the virtual world, and that only by willfully acknowledging that they both share the same space, can we start in the right direction of fixing it. That’s the direction Google’s Project Glass is headed, and I think that’s the right way.

The approach taken by the SixthSense project and by Google Glass mainly interacts with the user in a visual manner. And for the latter, there isn’t any really “good” and unobtrusive way to interact with that information. Both of the projects have extremely high output bandwidth (conveying information by projecting it into the user’s eye in one way or another), but limited input bandwidth and still fairly non-discreet (waving hands around to form shapes and sliding a bar on the frame, respectively). The Pedant takes a different approach by focusing on tactile input and output. This places the project more in the league of people who implant magnets under their skin by hijacking the sense of touch to convey information about the surroundings.

It’s going to be a tiny device which fits within the dimensions of a shoe insole including an Arduino Pro, a Bluetooth Mate, an Accelerometer, 2000mAh LiPo battery, and three or more vibration motors. By tapping the foot (or by orienting it in slightly different ways) the user can input data in a manner similar to the telegraph. However, nothing necessarily restricts it to being sent through a single “stream”, so it could end up more like a chorded telegraph (a la chorded keyboard). The great thing is that with chording, it becomes much more practical to receive information at reasonable rates.

Just like how a cell phone can vibrate to signal that the user has been left a message, the pedant would be used primarily to handle notifications, but rather than indistinguishable general sensations on the thigh, it’ll portray the type of notifications as well as the content, and the user even has the possibility to respond without changing the environment.

Without weird tactile abstract character sets, the Pedant could be interesting just as a sort of social network where users can feel the presence of other users in their general vicinity. It could monitor the footsteps of all nearby Pedant wearers and as it’s connected via a cellular data network and a smartphone GPS to trigger the specific vibration motors to evoke an awareness of how fast they’re walking and what general direction they are. In a sense, a social network of pedometers.

Posted in Pedant.

Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , .


2 Responses

Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.

  1. Jonathan Hall says

    Tell me more. I’ve always thought chorded toe tying was a good idea.

  2. JasonD says

    I actually like where this concept is headed… Though it is not a new idea, in the least… It is quite possibly the best implementation of it, headed in the right direction, that I have seen so far. I can already imagine walking around town, with the device setup to monitor when my “dinner is ready”, at a local restaurant, while I am no-where near the place. Then my foot feels a vibration, one I am familiar with, letting me know my order has been started. Yet, I am so far from my destination, that arrival “in time”, would not be possible. A quick tap on my toe, and I have just alerted the cook to stall my order for 15 minutes. Now I finish shopping, and head to the restaurant, again alerting them with a tap, that I am on my way.

    My arrival alerts them, as I approach the door, with a similar method. They greet and seat me, then serve my freshly heated dinner. With another tap, I flirt with the waitress, and auto-tip her for the friendly smile. Her response is another silent stealth signal, sending me her number and facebook links. Final tap, and dinner is paid and valet parking has been alerted to bring me my car, before I have even stood-up from my seat. The final signal vibrates my foot again, letting me know the car is ready, parked and waiting. I head home for the night… (Alarm set by my presence, as I enter the room and remove my shoes.)

    All without having said a single word.

    Ok, a little “out there”… But, not unrealistic.

    BTW ++200 for using Arduino for this. (FYI, the smaller 8-prong chips may be all you need, looking at the wires you have setup. That saves a LOT of room. Look for “minimalist arduino”, or “tiny arduino”.)

    P.S. I came here looking for your ajax animator, and you blew my mind with this instead. Dude, you are like mentally 40 years old. You make me seem like I am the one in high-school, reading this stuff. Apply for a job with google. They already know who you are, trust me. They do and fund stuff like this all the time. (But take me with you. I am not as lucky to have your mind for this, but my mind has other uses, related to application.)



Some HTML is OK

or, reply to this post via trackback.