Review for Project 15
Best proposal: Yes
Organization: 8/10
Overall project idea: 7/10

This project seeks to develop a vibrotactile feedback system to help a motorist localize unseen or unattended to objects during driving.

The proposal is well-written and well-organized. The description of the project is clear and the illustrations are helpful for understanding the variety of proposed test
conditions.

For the related work, this reviewer's opinion is that a bit more comprehensive review of the state of the art in haptic technology for related purposes could be appropriate.
Unfortunately, this reviewer's knowledge of haptics is somewhat limited, but the amount of publications in that field suggests that there is a lot of related work on related
technologies,

This reviewer is interested to see the outcome of this project. The reviewer is not sure that the problem that this project seeks to solve can be classified as exclusively tool
use. It is possible to check the blind spots during driving, and to see a child while backing up the car. It can be argued that the reason for the accidents and also for the
discussed helicopter mishaps is not that the information is not available, but rather that it is not attended to. All the relevant data is available for the helicopter pilot too,
it is just there is too much of it to focus on really important things. Similarly, the number of child deaths would certainly reduce if the drivers would simply pay more attention
to the blind spots and doublecheck that there is nobody in the rear mirror. It is not that this information is not available -- rather it is that it is not attended to. Will the
use of another modality improve this situation? Or will the driver simply ignore the vibrations similar to how a helicopter pilot ignores some of the warning lights on the
overloaded instrument panel? It would be nice to see a bit more focus on attention in the final report.

Overall, this is a great course project proposal. Despite its somewhat tangential relationship to robots, this reviewer has nominated it for the best project proposal because of
the amount of work to be done, the fact that this is a single-person project, and high quality of the text.