Grad Student Builds Glasses That Give You Spider-Sense

A grad student named Mateo bet his thesis — and his diploma — on the idea that he could successfully design, build and test haptic feedback glasses that would give you directional spider-sense, just like Spider-Man.

Guess who graduated?

He started with his admiration of Spider-Man’s ability to sense danger, and gave it some serious thought.

The goal was sensory substitution. It turns out that the human brain is very good at using incoming sensory information, and doesn’t particularly care where it comes from. Mateo’s first idea was to use ultrasonic sensors, but these proved too bulky to mount on a pair of glasses. He went with much more compact infrared laser sensors instead.

Mounting them in a 3d printed frame, and cannibalizing his Millenium Falcon model to get some ultra-thin wires from its lighting kit, he soldered up the project, then wrote the sensor code in Python. The goal was not to detect anything that came near. Even standing next to a wall would set them off, and create more sensory noise. This would just overload the wearer’s senses, making them less safe rather than protecting them from harm.

Mateo determined that the glasses needed to be selective about the velocity of the objects they reacted to. The faster moving the object, the harder the little vibration motors build into the glasses would respond. Ultimately, he built a pair of glasses that made blindfolded test subjects 83% more likely to detect incoming hazards than a person wearing the blindfold alone.

Mateo thinks the invention could be refined into a product, and could be useful for emergency responders, and people with low or no vision to help them feel safer as they move through their surroundings.

For more from Mateo, visit his YouTube page and his Instagram.

Awesome work, Mateo. SCIFI.radio salutes you.