Cell phones are not dangerous because the driver was looking at his phone or playing with the buttons when he had an accident. They are dangerous because they encourage your mind to wander. Most people's brains are really not good at multitasking. (Try patting your head while rubbing your belly counterclockwise)

Anything that takes your mind away from the road when you're driving even if you can see the road is dangerous. (They found that talking to someone in a passenger seat is not as dangerous because if they notice danger and you don't, they'll inform you of the danger automatically by tensing up or whatever.)

If your brain worked like a single process cpu, it would be like setting Twitter to high priority while relegating driving your 2-ton SUV to low priority. It will work well enough most of the time, but sooner or later, you'll crash the SUV.

(Source: BS in psychology)

And yes, I have no problem with the head patting/belly rubbing. Have you ever seen a cop driving a patrol car? He's juggling radios, phones, a computer with a big screen for looking up warrants and stuff, entering plate numbers, looking out the windows for suspicious behavior - the actual road is a mere distraction. People can learn to manage their divided attention, and if they can't handle checking a speedometer without crashing into the guardrail they probably shouldn't be driving.

That said, I wouldn't use this to text while driving. Seeing who's calling and waving my hand to answer for a brief "I'll be there in 10 minutes" seems reasonable, however, and is safer than fumbling with the phone the old-fashioned way.

For example, I would guess that there are people out there who can safely drive a car with their blood-alcohol level past the legal limit. There are presumably people who can multi-task (text or phone & drive) safely too.

Once these activities become acceptable, you can't pick and choose who is allowed to perform them based on some skill metric.

Deputy who killed former Napster COO after drifting into the bike lane while distracted by his laptop will not face charges because he was answering a work-related email

- Milton Olin Jr, 65, was fatally struck by a Los Angeles county sheriff's patrol car December 8, 2013, as he rode in the bike lane in Calabasas

- Deputy Anthony Wood was returning from a fire call when he took his eyes off the road to type a work-related message on an electronic device

- Olin was director of operations for Napster between 2000 and 2002 and was a prominent entertainment lawyer

- The victim's wife and sons have filed a wrongful death lawsuit claiming Wood was negligent

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2736376/Deputy-kille...

Somehow I feel that if I struck a cyclist while answering a work related email (not that I'd ever do such a thing) that I would not be getting off that lightly.

   "We do not know of a single case of a cyclist fatality in which the driver 
   was prosecuted, except for D.U.I. or hit-and-run," Leah Shahum, the 
   executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, told me. [1]

I'm going to speculate that driving is such an activity that doesn't require constant attention and involves quite a bit of monotony. In such circumstances, mind wandering will happen—be there a mobile phone, Navdy, or nothing at all.

This is a human factor. The only complete solution to this issue seems to be self-driving cars, when your mind and its wandering are taken out of equation.

With that in mind, a mobile phone doesn't seem to stand equal to other causes of mind-wandering, contrary to your claim. A phone also obstructs large portions of the road from your view when you're using it.

Stop there. What would lead you to this speculation?

Of course driving requires constant attention and care, the full time you are behind the wheel of an automobile. You're piloting a 2 ton machine made of whirling metal and filled with flammable liquid traveling at high speeds, usually within less than a meter of someone else doing the same.

There is never a good reason to divert attention from the task of driving while you are driving. Full stop.

First, I should've put “constant and full attention” there. My phrasing was off. As to why I came to this conclusion:

1. People often ride for a few hours without breaks. My assumption is that it's not possible to pay constant and full attention throughout this time—our minds are bound to wander.

2. The pattern I usually observe is when the driver, depending on road situation, varies the degree of attention they pay to the driving. At one time they're driving relaxedly and multitasking (talking to a passenger or someone on the phone—by definition they're not paying their full attention at this time), while at another they're more or less concentrated on the road.

Disclaimer—I don't myself drive a car, but I often observe people driving. I've observed both experienced drivers who drive frequently and more beginning drivers, the pattern described under (2) is the same.

Update: the comments here, coupled with my observations, make me believe—roughly—that a) drivers don't (can't) pay their full and constant attention to the road, and b) many are in denial of (a).

That reminds me of the pope, doesn't play the game but tells others how to play it.

Well, I do. I drive way too much in fact and I believe strongly that driving is a full-time 100% on the ball occupation. That probably saved my life twice this year alone and prevented one other probably bad accident from happening. I drive in places where traffic is very much unlike the traffic that you are probably used to (you'd call it a madhouse), dogs, other drivers, horse carts, madmen, trucks overtaking in blind corners, drunk people on the road (on bicycles, no lights). You name it they've got it here.

When I'm tired even a little bit I stop the car and sleep until I feel rested again. My phone is off. At night I use the GPS to tell me what's going to happen around the corner (hairpins in mountainous terrain where you can't stop are a real joy) when I can't find a place to stop safely to overnight. But as soon as I do the car gets stopped and I wait until it's light again.

I turn down the instrument panel lights to have good night vision as much as possible, this is plenty to read the instruments by if I have to and means I get to see what's on the road, which is a lot more important than whatever is on that screen. (Such as a very black and very large dog that jumped out of nowhere a few weeks ago).

This probably all may seem paranoid but it has served me very well over the years. Even so, I think that navdy has a spot, but only if you use it as a navigation device and place it outside of your direct field of vision. It screws up your night vision and that's bad enough when you have to look at it, it's much worse when that happens all the time.

I do drive myself. Have for 20+ years. Just drove 1300 miles over the summer vacation, sometimes on long monotonous roads, and I'd be lying if I was paying full attention all the time.

My experience is exactly as he describes. In city traffic, at traffic lights, or just before an exit, my full attention is required and constant (I actually dislike GPS because of this, it distracts, especially if notifications are late, I'm looking at you Google Nav - 'keep left at the fork').

However, after so many years of driving, I have also developed some sort of autopilot/'trance driving' mode. It is typically engaged on long legs, or when extremely tired on a very familiar route (e.g. going home). I betcha if you ask professional drivers like truckers, they'll tell you the same.

Edit: While in this mode, my 'look-ahead' window is maximized. I gaze much further ahead than I do in 'stress' situations. My focus point is definitely way past the windshield, usually several cars ahead of me. I gauge my speed by engine sound, distance to the cars ahead of me, local traffic flow etc etc. As such, I am not convinced that this heads-up display approach is a safety improvement. Sure, your eyes will be on the road, but by requiring a change of focus, you cannot look ahead to anticipate issues/changes/risks.

This plus Highway Hypnosis [1] show that some of us at least drive without full conscious attention.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_hypnosis

Please don't do this.

You're going to get yourself or someone else killed one day. Remember that I can do everything in my power to be a responsible driver I am still subject to the sum total of the risks everybody else takes and driving when you're that tired is an un-acceptable risk.

WTF. People shouldn't drive when they're extremely tired.

When you're driving without distractions, sure, your mind wanders. You're thinking about a date tonight, or that jerk at work, or whatever. But as soon as your eyes pick up something of interest, like an exit sign, another driver, or a bad situation up ahead, you can immediately focus exclusively on the road. You can do this pretty quickly

Similarly, when you're carrying on a conversation with someone, the other person will generally quiet down as soon as the situation changes.

When you're on a cell phone, that changes. You're paying much, much more attention to a cell phone conversation than you are to someone sitting next to you because you have to listen harder. Not only that, the conversation is independent of the driving situation. Most people will not tell the guy on the phone with them to shut up; they'll just try to carry on the conversation. Even worse, a lot of people aren't paying enough attention to the road to realize that the situation requires more attention and that they need to put down the phone. This causes accidents.

Finally, texting is the worst - you're literally taking your eyes off the road to send a message.

I've only been driving for 7 years, but already had several benign accidents (no casualties or whatever, only some damaged metal). On each and every one of these situations, the cause was not speeding, nor my phone, nor any outside distraction, but just my mind wandering off the driving and thinking of something else.

Sometimes I get home and I do not remember the ride, not even which road I took or anything, and I think to myself, what could have happened while my mind was wandering. I just can't keep my full attention on something for that long, period.

1. Driving is one of those activities where people actually use a lot of their brains functions to do. This is partly why it can tire you out so much.

2. People speaking to a passenger drive as poorly as people otherwise impaired but the fact that they're both in the car (grounding them in the fact that they're in the vehicle) and that both of them pay some attention to the road helps mitigate the negative effects.

All I can recall is that I read #1 in a BBC News article and the latter on something I found on Google Scholar. I feel they're relevant. If you're interested, I hope it helps.

Please, shut up.

I've read the literature on multitasking while driving. Texting is one of the worst. Talking on the phone comes somewhere in the middle (hands free or not doesn't seem to matter), but even talking to passengers has a measurable decrease in safety. The problem is that people, as a whole, are willing to bear quite a bit of risk in order to indulge in their distractions, but their behavior additionally forces those around them to bear some of the risk as well.

I agree that self-driving cars are a huge way forward for safety, but in the meantime it makes sense to minimize human error.

True. From my anecdotal observation the reason why talking over mobile phone is dangerous (while talking to a passenger is not) seems to be social norms—immediately cutting off the conversation to focus on the road doesn't seem like an acceptable thing to do, and we avoid doing this unless absolutely necessary. For a more responsible driver, this ‘absolutely necessary’ threshold is pretty low—as it should be—but such people seem to be rare.

Second, there is research that shows that dividing your attention just between driving and talking can cause a significant reduction of reaction speed. Driving safely is not monotonous activity. Of course, if your car is crawling in a LA traffic jam, accidents are mostly non-fatal, but when you are driving 100km/h, cars are dangerous objects.

The trouble is our brains primarily adapt to repeated stimuli eg driving in good conditions. Since no one spends most of their time driving narrowly avoiding accidents, that activity isn't one the brain can learn to automate ( well, maybe it's possible with a realistic driving simulator), so dangerous driving requires everyone's full attention.

Since we don't usually have advanced warning of when dangerous driving will happen, the best we can do is spend as much time as possible paying attention to road conditions.

Studies have found hands-free phones are just as dangerous. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/hands-free-phones-just-as-risky-...

driver disengagement is the problem, whether caused by a physical, visual, or cognitive distraction. the goal shouldn't be weighting how dangerous these various devices are, it should be on how to ensure drivers are engaged to a point where they can take over from auto-pilot (repetitive aspect) when something goes wrong.

[1] i'm not a kid, i have many kids of my own, just trying to avoid quantification of driving.

The important tech is heads up display projected rendering on glass in a car. As long as that works well there will be good applications beyond reading twitter. safety information, car and dashboard alerts, and gps map information all come to mind. Anyone who has ever played a video game should be familiar with HUDs that help you and aren't distracting.

As long as we're being figurative, a lot of sweat and tears have gone into missile design and prison labor contracts. And this is not completely uncharted waters, phone-HUD has been a thing for years now.

- imperfect/unrealistic physics

- reduced vision

- less/incorrect physical feedback

So you are claiming that having to look away from the road for possibly whole seconds to deal with a phone is not really dangerous, but what is dangerous is your mind wandering? I'm sorry but experience and common sense says otherwise.

I would also argue that your second point is not as not clear cut either. Having some sort of distraction is definitely helpful most of the time when driving long distances. I personally find audio books very greatly help to fight off monotony, which in turn keeps my attention higher than if I was not being distracted.

> So you are claiming that having to look away from the road for possibly whole seconds to deal with a phone is not really dangerous, but what is dangerous is your mind wandering?

I'm not OP, but it's not that your mind is wandering per se (which suggests a neutral state) but your mind is actively focused on something other than the road, like an HUD in front of your face.

Peeking at the next turn on nav mode is not a big deal, but if you're composing a text using voice, I'll bet anyone $100 that the voice recognition isn't good enough that you won't be staring at the screen to check it's getting the right words.

The thing I dislike most about this product is that it deludes people into thinking this is a "safe" way to operate your phone and text while driving, and basically gives permission to do so. No way to text while driving is safe, not really even at red lights.

In regards to long trips, I still maintain that having a distraction like music, audio books, or company to talk to is actually safer than not having them. Your brain getting tired of monotonous activity and scenery is a real thing as anyone who's done a 10 hour drive can tell you. But again my comment wasn't really in the same context as the parent I guess, so there's that.

This is of course true, and I noticed that drivers anticipating longer trips often like to take someone with them so that the passenger can keep them awake and concentrated.

But then again, on a long trip you really should make those 30-minute stops every 3 hours or so.

Yeah, for sure. That's the problem with this sort of product: you release it without texting functionality and [most people will reach for their phone to text] and [some people will stop texting while driving]. And lose product sexiness etc.

You release it with texting and people will think it gives them carte blanche to text while driving. Both not great outcomes.

I think better would be a standard library, like "report I'll be late," that relays my current coordinates and ETA in the message to my spouse. (And simply showing up late would make me nervous; reporting my delay relieves tension.) I'm not a brain scientist so I can't say what the total effect would be.

Let me take that bet ;). Some people really don't care, and it makes me want to kill them when I get a voice-typed message that's complete gibberish because the sender thinks comprehensibility is for the losers.

Whenever you find yourself saying this, particularly in response to an expert in the field, that is the time to stop and listen instead of talking.

This is a false choice and something that the person you are replying to never said.

The point is that anything that distracts your mind/vision from the road is dangerous, be it looking at your phone or reading a tweet in a transparent HUD display. What Navdy is building, while interesting, isn't necessarily safer.

Yes, looking at a HUD increases your risk of an accident. The best option is to have 100% attention focused on the road and your surroundings. If I had to choose between mobile or HUD, HUD would win every single time. If I had to choose between HUD and nothing distracting, then obviously the later is better. Yeah, just put the freaking phone away when you are driving.

This is safer than looking at a phone. I agree that it has the same inherent problem of distracting the driver with other tasks and making it easier for your mind to wander. But it's still a step up.

Perhaps they should make it a "driving tasks only" device. Speed, navigation etc. But unfortunately the law allow devices in the car that provide other information and services as long as they're hands free and they're not playing video. While the law allows it, people will fill that gap and these guys would fail miserably by ignoring that side of the market.

Edit: I read comments further down that enlightened me to the point of view that this creates the illusion of safely texting while driving, and people may be texting and tweeting more while driving, distracting them more rather than less. The laws need to change.

I mean, I know that it's incredibly dangerous, but because I do it for hours every day, I become desensitized to the danger. So, I check out my facebook feed or respond to that text message. Before smart phones, I would pick up a paper book that I had just bought and skim a little 'cause I just couldn't wait to get home. If it weren't that, I might be looking for wildlife out my passenger-side window or fiddling with the radio, etc.

I guess I'm a bad person, but I'm pretty confident that I'm not the only one. My guess is that a device like this that can keep your attention without diverting your eyes from the road is, in general, going to improve safety.

Of course, I could be wrong.

Those need to be checked regularly as well and they occupy mindshare. You even need to focus on them and given that they are a lot closer than the road that takes time away from the road, refocus, then inspect the dials then look back out of the front windshield and re-focus.

Driving itself is a multi-tasking effort.

The number of buttons and indicators in a car (especially a high end one) can be quite distracting.

And not checking your speed diligently where I live gets expensive really quickly, 3 km over the actual limit (as checked by the GPS) will get you a ticket. So I actually drive with the GPS 'on' even when I know perfectly well where I'm going because it checks my speed without me looking at it.

When there's no speed camera or other risk of speed trap, I don't pay attention to numeric speed at all. Instead, I drive to the conditions, and approximately follow the speed limit as appropriate - but I may be 5 or 10 over or under depending on how clear the road ahead is of hazards.

Fuel, oil and other gauges don't change constantly and don't demand attention with flashing and animations, unless something is seriously wrong - in which case the vehicle should be stopped.

I should add, though, I don't actually drive. I ride a motorcycle and scooter, daily, all year round in London. Anything less than 100% focus is a quick route to A&E.

All I do know is that I spend too much time checking that damn dial. So I fixed that by setting the GPS to warn me with an audible alarm when I get to 1 km over the GPS measured speed compared to the posted limit of the road I'm on (it adjusts those automatically). Very useful.

Daniel Simons, a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois, says this in his episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast:

http://youarenotsosmart.com/2012/04/24/yanss-podcast-episode...

Head-up displays are discussed starting at 12:31.

If I remember correctly, pilots were at danger to miss planes on the runway while using a head-up display.

"Even pilots use it – it's safe." Is it?

What? This was exceedingly easy to do. And I've never heard of this.

No-one died just yet from Navdy.

I love to see this kind of technology on HN and not just apps that play with pictures, videos or text.

Ah yes. Do you also give philosophical advice by any chance?

Displays like this are standard on a lot of high end performance vehicles. The teams who worked on stuff like this can run circles around your BS in psychology.

I drove cars with this technology and it's actually better since you don't have to look down at the wheel or at the awkwardly mounted portable GPS/phone that usually falls off the mount every other day.

http://www.bmw.com/com/en/newvehicles/mseries/m5sedan/2013/s...

Watch »From One Second to the Next« [1] from the »Texting and Driving - It can wait« campaign.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BqFkRwdFZ0

You can be as careful as you want, but driving is a collective process, and if the guy next to you messes up, you can suffer a lot.

I was following a riced out Acura today that was flashing the brakes all the time, GF said ?old person?, but grandma doesn't drive that car. Some rapper's white girl friend in head to toe pink was diddling on her phone WHILE DRIVING and tapping on the brakes every time she looked up. I see phone usage while driving everyday and the majority of it isn't talking it is interacting with the device itself. Madness.

It's probably the case that people using Navdy will drive worse than people with 100% attention on driving. It's also quite likely they'll drive better than people using a cellphone directly. The question is if it makes people feel safer and thus more willing to do the dangerous activity, countering the safety benefit. (There's also a clear benefit to people actually using phones while driving; letting people know they're late, not being bored, etc. It's just generally trumped by the safety loss; I'd be willing to sacrifice SOME safety for convenience/entertainment.)

It's the same thing with sex (abstinence vs. barrier-based birth control vs. hormonal birth control), drugs (illegal vs. decrminalized vs. legalized), etc.

It's possible NOT having technologies like this leads to overall less safety; it's also possible it leads to more safety. It depends on the specifics.

I have nav (with voice, and a driver information display in my line of sight while driving), and use that, and also don't feel particularly bad about looking at my phone screen to see who called, etc. while stopped at a red light (although I realize it's less than perfectly safe; it's also more of a legal risk than a safety risk in california now, IMO.)

Actually using the phone while driving, or having anything but the most brief and cursory conversation while driving in the city, is clearly a sacrifice in safety; I don't mind phone calls on highways, but I generally won't answer in the city.

Other situations are still not super useful and probably won't get used. Can you meaningful respond to text messages with voice? Not quite, yet at least. Can you skim read them? Yes. That is not super distracting but still enough of a distraction in some cases. But I can't think of many use-cases that are any worse than a bluetooth headset voice conversation.

Edit: Yes. http://sandwichvideo.com/

And they still haven't changed their homepage.

Navdy could be really useful, even improving of total safety, as HUD navigation. But maybe that's not where the money is.

"Hey watch this video???"

I just can't believe it.

It's a poor choice of image, though obviously they were just trying to embed the "Hey, watch our video in your browser" instructions into the photo itself.

Aside from that, even reading SMS while you drive seems like a bad idea to me. But I'm really tempted to get a Navdy for features that improve safety, by moving stuff that I already look at (speed, navigation) from my dashboard to the HUD. I've been shopping for cars recently and wishing that HUDs were available in more affordable models. I just hope you can turn off Navdy's text/call notifications and other extras.

I didn't see a comment yet about placing a loose object in front of your face. During a head-on collision you will eat that thing. Don't even put a box of matches on your dashboard. CD's become chainsaws. And this hunk of plastic?

Every year, loose objects inside cars during crashes cause hundreds of serious injuries and even deaths. In this paper, we describe findings from a study of 25 cars and drivers, examining the objects present in the car cabin, the reasons for them being there, and driver awareness of the potential dangers of these objects. With an average of 4.3 potentially dangerous loose objects in a car‟s cabin, our findings suggest that despite being generally aware of potential risks, considerations of convenience, easy access, and lack of in-the-moment awareness lead people to continue to place objects in dangerous locations in cars. Our study highlights opportunities for addressing this problem by tracking and reminding people about loose objects in cars.

http://www.star-uci.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/ubic489n-...

Cars are regulated to travel below a certain speed. Phones are regulated to their use outside of a vehicle (when operated by a human), and kitchen knives are illegal to carry in public.

While the parent comment is a little melodramatic, there's still something to be said regarding the safety of usage in this product and its affect on other people.

HUDs are not bad. But Navdy keeps marketing their product as a text-while-driving aid. Not very smart.

Texting while driving is one of the most dangerous distractions primarily because of the interface: eyes off the road, hands off the wheel.

If Navdy can potentially reduce the danger of texting to a level comparable to that of, say, talking to passengers in your car, then I don't see how you can justifiably "realize" that it's a bad idea without seeing some statistics first.

This is also not intended solely for low-visibility conditions when the reflection of the phone on the windshield is visible. I can't imagine the HUDWAY app being particularly useful during the day, for example.

I don't see that they need to prove anything except that it's a cool and useful product for which a market exists. Their point is simply that automated navigation while driving is cumbersome and unsafe with the use of simple phone apps. A dedicated piece of hardware solves that problem, and in a cool way.

I do feel that their message is undermined a bit by the safety concerns presented when you have seamless phone integration for writing and reading texts, answering calls, and tweeting.

If you can reduce the number of distractions please do. A phone needs only one button, answer/break connection and you shouldn't be dialling 'out' while driving anyway. No need to pop up pictures and other distractions in front of the driver, such a call at the wrong moment could easily cause an accident, if only because you will instinctively re-focus on the changing item in front of you.

Set your GPS navigator to do voice announcements and only check the display when you suspect a sudden change in direction or are not sure what lane to sort into. Other than that the voice indications should be enough.

GPS, cool. Text etc? ARGH.

This is a good product. Don't you use nav? What's better: Looking at your nav screen pinned to the dash or in the console; looking down at the phone in your lap, because you know you can't be seen holding it; or looking at the road with augmented information?

If you think HUDs are more dangerous than squinting at road signs or reading maps, then you can petition your legislators to make it illegal. I'm all for it, though, because I know the alternatives are worse.

"I see you have a Navdy there, ma'am. I'm going to need to confiscate your car keys before you hurt somebody."

A random idea: Adding a camera to this could open up the dashcam market. In Russia for example, dashcams a very common and are a part of the driving culture (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashcam and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance).

Even where I live (Tasmania, Australia) I'm fairly sure there is either a proposal or already a law banning even hands free devices, because they are seen as just as dangerous. This device is going to be illegal to start with.

The only two thing I see as being feasible from a safety point of view for cars is either some sort of augmented reality for lane guidance and navigation, or your phone giving you direction via voice (which they already do).

I don't want to destroy their hype bu they should really give that problem some thought.

They did a great job with the marketing video for this. Really curious to see where this ends up.

Time of flight cameras? They predominantly use NIR (900nm or circa) and so they're rubbish in sunlight. Try using your kinect outdoors. Beyond the kinect they're also very expensive, a few thousand each. The kinect 1 also fails outdoors and when the range is > 5m or so.

LIDAR? Well sure, you can buy a rotating line scanner - 100-180deg field of view typical. They're very nice, but also (new) you're looking at around $3-5k. Don't even dream about getting a Velodyne system, like the Google car uses.

Stereo? Yeah... well stereo is nice, but it takes a lot of computational grunt to do it in real time, reliably and in varying illuminations (good luck using it at night).

Thermal? We're getting there, FLIR make some fairly low cost, low resolution sensors, but still you're looking at $500-1000 a pop in OEM quantities.

RADAR/Ultrasonics are reasonably cheap nowadays and they're pretty good for coarse measurements like when you need to know how far you are from the wall in your garage. We're getting to the point where RADAR is good enough for collision avoidance (i.e. auto-braking) on high speed roads.

More cameras are cool, but you need to know how to process the data and present it clearly to the user. I can see the advantage of having a camera for a rear-view mirror particularly for vehicles like vans with no rear windows. Side mirrors are still useful and for most people the cost of installing multiple high resolution video cameras and monitors isn't worth the savings in petrol from drag reduction. If you replace a mirror with a camera you also need a very high resolution display, a wide angle camera that doesn't distort too much and a way of viewing it in any conceivable illumination condition. Mirrors are also nice and mechanical, unless you crash they rarely ever break.

Thanks for the state of the art, good to know.

I assumed the relevant sensor tech was cheap and ubiquitous because every time I rent a car these days, it seems to have both a backup camera and radar. Maybe that's all we've got though, and maybe tricky to point that gear in every direction and have it always on, and as you mention, usefully conveyed to a driver is the big hurdle.

Though I have one crazy idea for that, thanks to George Lucas.

Some people pick on this one scene in Star Wars, when Han and Luke are fighting in the turrets, and you hear all these ships whizzing past, even though there's no sound in space. In one of the more contrived retcons, some fans insist that the sounds of whizzing ships are actually just a different approach to HCI. The ship detects threats, then pumps in naturalish-sounding audio telling you where they are in relation to the Falcon.

I know that's not a mass market idea, but my dream car would use fancy radar to make nearby cars sounds a bit like starfighters. (So long as I can turn it off, probably gets old fast.)

So yes, my primary interest in sensor tech is not reducing drag, or even accidents, but in feeling like I'm piloting a spaceship. Don't judge. :)

From what I've heard, the FLIR lepton core might be around $~250 in quantities, which could make it affordable as an add-on module.

1. Keep the HUD in focus and the road out of focus. Your eyes are still seeing a lot of road information that doesn't necessarily need the high fidelity. This is relatively safer than looking away entirely. The human brain can do a lot with scarce information.

2. Keep the road in focus and the HUD out of focus. For things like navigation this will still work fairly well since all you usually need for the navigation is the shape of the road, the direction you'll need to turn in, and how many blocks (roughly) you have until the destination. This is relatively safer than looking away at your phone or gps from time to time, or even looking around for the street names.

Realistically, people will switch between the two extremes.

The thing is, jet fighter pilots use HUDs. If those work for them, I'm pretty sure it's ok for a car too.

Plus the road is quite boring site most of the time. You are not always in fast traffic or streets full of pedestrians. If you leave in Nevada, close to Highway-50 even more so, but I digress.

I can't believe I have to say this but JET FIGHTER PILOTS DO NOT USE HUDS TO TWEET.

Yeah, and average drivers don't face even 1/10 of the speeds and situations a jet fighter pilot faces, including the G's.

Things I didn't say but people still replied as I said them: a) that jet fighters and car drivers have the same skills, b) that jet fighters tweet.

My comment was plain and simple. To rephrase: if HUDs work in such quick-response situations, in a vehicle with 100 times the complexity of your average car, 10 times the speed, and missiles against you, then sure the "average driver" can look at a HUD to see a new tweet, if he doesn't have to de-focus from the road with this technology.

I really hope you're being sarcastic and just forgot about Poe's law here.

That part of a video is basically a slap in the face. The video says that when you use a phone while driving, bad things happen. What are those bad things? A police car stopping you. What the hell. They definitely should stop you. And take away your driving license. And your car. And maybe your offspring.

Ok, I'm getting ahead of myself. Basically, police stopping you for texting while driving is the least bad possible consequence.

"Navdy's transparent Head-Up Display (HUD) projects information as if it's floating six feet in front of you. In the car you already have."

Further down:

"The image is focused into the distance so the road stays in focus while the driver views the information presented by Navdy. The same technology is used in all commercial airplanes so the pilot can keep their eyes on the runway while landing the airplane."

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phones_and_driving_safet...

(I also doubt a commercial pilot is using this tech to send tweets to his mom while landing a plane. The "Pilots use this, so it's gotta be safe, right?" line just made me facepalm.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8258117

See the context? "Navdy (navdy.com)"

One could also argue that when you have to look down to do something distracting, at least you are being reminded -- by taking your eyes off the road -- that the thing you're doing is distracting and you should probably pay attention to the road.

Anyway, here's a link for anyone else who wants to watch their introduction video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKL4PJICS40

Did they do that as a joke (including the SANDWCH license plate from the video production company)?

First big problem I see, is that it will be sitting in the sun while driving, so it will quickly overheat and have sun damage over time.

What magic is this?

For example, here's a description of the HUD currently available in several BMW cars:

http://www.bmw.com/com/en/insights/technology/technology_gui...

"The image is projected in such a way that it appears to be about two metres away, above the tip of the bonnet, making it particularly comfortable to read. BMW Head-Up Display halves the time it takes for eyes to shift focus from road to the instruments and back."

Absolutely gut-wrenching.

Looks like an awesome product!

pre-orders now, just email me at [email protected]

there's no way this will make it past state legislation

https://www.navdy.com/assets/bg_10-88a56c4c20214704cf0b39542...

Of course, it depends a lot on what you do with it. Moving existing displays like the speedometer and navigation instructions to a HUD can be an improvement in safety. But if it encourages more interactive phone use, that could obviously cause problems.

http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/cell-phones-driving-c...