Week 13

Last week I talked about a presentation regarding heads up displays for cars. This week I thought it would be appropriate to look at a presentation by Michael Ybarra about a specific device in a similar category. The device is called the Navion WayRay, and it looks much better than the two information projecting displays I talked about last week.

The idea of this device is that it overlays directions over the road, augmenting arrows and other such guiding symbols into the user's line of sight as the user drives. I think this is brilliant, as the user keeps their eyes on the road instead of on a GPS screen.

Whenever I drive with GPS on my phone, I am constantly glancing down at my phone to make sure I have not and will not miss my turn. And whenever I am on a busy road, every time I look away from the road is nerve wracking. Any second that I am not looking where I am going could potentially end in an accident. So I am so glad to see a device that lets me make sure I stay on route without taking my eyes off of the road.

One thing I do not like about this device is the user interface. All user interaction is done through hand gestures. There is no voice recognition and as far as I can tell there are no buttons on the device what so ever. My experience with hand gestures using camera tracking is that they are unreliable, but then again I do not have much experience with such things. What I do have experience with is driving, and when driving I usually have both hands on the steering wheel. I think a huge amount of convience is missed from a lack of voice recognition, as voice commands are hands free, allowing the user to, say, change their route while driving with ease. Not to mention that, as Ybarra touched on in the presentation, hand guestures can be misunderstood by bystanders outside of the car, potentially causing accidents.

Last week, both projection devices I talked about project on to the windshield. The WayRay Navion instead projects onto its own glass screen. This seems to mean that the projections are not as hard to see in sunlight as images projected to the windshield, while still allowing for the screen to be "seen through." I think this is a good way around the problem of visibility, however I worry that the perspective from which the screen is viewed can skew where the augmented graphics appear over the real world, much like how the position of one's eyes affects what one sees through the rearview mirror. This could force the user to keep their head in one position in order for the augmented graphics to "line up" with the real world.

All in all, I think this technology has immense potential, especially if it were to be built into car windshields. I think that would not only be great for navigation, but for displaying information, such as dashboard information, as well. But then again, we may have self driving cars before that becomes consumer ready, rendering this all useless....