Somatic Labs

Turn your body into a programmable display.

Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Our first product, Moment, provides the passage of time and the movements of real-time data as a sensation that moves across your skin using precise haptic feedback. A musician may want 76 beats per minute to match an exact tempo, while a student trying to study may want to feel the passing of 5 minute intervals to maintain productivity. In the future, we plan to integrate external API’s to provide real-time updates of time-series data—displayed entirely through vibrotactile feedback. A stock broker could always feel the movements of the market, while a surgeon could always have a patient's vitals available—all through discreet haptic sensations. People resort to viewing real-time data graphically, but this form factor is not always a biologically intuitive design for the movements of a quantitative value. Currently the best we have are LCD displays—we can do better. Instead of strapping smaller screens to our wrists, we should be turning our skin into a programmable display. People who work with real-time streams of data (e.g. doctors, stock brokers, musicians) already have precise charts of information. Computer interfaces have traditionally been audio-visual, but another visual display—no matter how high the resolution—does not drastically improve access to valuable information. The natural world provides us with multi-modal streams of data that our bodies can intuitively interpolate; we want to endow computer interfaces with the ability to communicate through more of our senses.