Rumble is an ambient haptic geospatial notification platform. I built Rumble during the course of my research at the MIT Media Lab, where I studied interaction and interface design, as well as geospatial data systems.
Rumble was a haptic notification cuff paired with an Android app (the bones of which would later become my Hyperinstruments Group Master’s thesis). Basically, you wore a cuff while you wandered around Boston; whenever you were standing directly over a subway track, the cuff would vibrate. If you pressed the vibrating cuff to your temple, the vibrations would magically resolve to speech—a synthesized voice telling you more, ie, “You are now standing on top of the MBTA Red Line.”
