By Richard Read
Once upon a time, vibrating things were awesome. There were vibrating mattresses at roadside motels, vibrating chairs at Sharper Image stores, and vibrating…well, other vibrating things. Now, Yale is out to change that.
Associate Professor John Morrell from the Yale School of Engineering has developed a car seat that vibrates when a rear-end collision looms. (Watch it.) Morrell has tricked out a garden-variety driver’s seat with 20 motor tactors — the same devices that cause your mobile phone to vibrate when you’ve turned off the ringer at dinner or the theatre because you’re a thoughtful person and not some knuckle-dragging, loud-mouthed cretin. Then, Morrell attached the seat to a driving simulator that pre-supposes a car with a radar-based safety system like PRE-SAFE setup you’d find in a Mercedes-Benz E-Class.
During test drives, when a car approaches quickly from behind, the tactors in the back of the seat go off, alerting the driver to impending danger. If one sweeps in from the left or right, the relevant side of the driver’s seat vibrates in response. Morrell believes that using tactile stimuli can evoke faster reactions from drivers than forcing them to look at a dashboard or heads-up display.
We love the concept, and if it saves lives, we’re all for it. True, it’s not the sort of “holy crap” response we typically have to vibrating things, but then, the times are clearly a-changin’.