Invisible feet under the vehicle

When we drive a car, we have many blind spots. The information from the outside is almost limited to vision and sound. We have a vision that the driver and the car unified and moves as one[1] to face the problem of the gap of the information between the outside of the car and inside. We call the unity of driver and the car Homunculus which makes communication with the outside of the vehicle. With this concept, we developed a new haptic system. Our system assigns the sense of driver's foot to the bottom of a car. It connects nine vibration motors on a grid to the nine IR distance sensors on a grid. If users use this system, they can feel something passed through the bottom of a car, a bump and so on with feeling like a sole of hid foot was touched. It is like a invisible foot(Figure1) is sticked out bottom of the cars. We applied our prototype to several cases in driving and found several interesting points on this. We would discuss on these points on this paper.