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Not quite neural implants

My blog piece of neural implants was fiction of course. However last night I saw a Horizon programme which had a couple of things that came close.

The first was a series of things (with a name I've forgotten) that are built into a helicopter pilot's harness that vibrate when he goes too high, or gets close to the ground. There's one near the belly button that shows you which direction you are moving. It's designed for situations like landing on sand where you have no visibility. They showed a pilot landing a simulator successfully with his eyes closed.

The second one was a belt with 8 vibrating pads around it. It was hooked up to a compass so that the pad nearest North vibrated continuously.

So whilst not quite being a heads-up display as my previous post predicted, it seems there's plenty of spare bandwidth with the sense to touch to get useful information into the brain.
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