Researchers of the Viterbi School of Engineering (University of Southern California) constructed and evaluated a tactile vest in combination with a stereo head-mounted camera. So with the camera they are able to measure the distance to objects in sight and the vest gives tactile signals to the one who is wearing it. Their main use case is to help blind people orientating. Therefore they won’t need the blindman’s stick anymore.
I’m sure there are a few other use cases such as helping people to navigate while they have to look at something different (maybe for construction workers).
But first they have to smarten this technology up ;) and also improve some things. Because there may be some problems for blind people navigation especially with little ledges / tripping hazards. How to ‘visualize’ that with a tactile vest? Furthermore it would be a big innovation if navigation hints are in 3D so the user can easily go ahead and / or sideways. And so on.
[viterbi.usc.edu: “Guide Vests”]