I noticed that both posts from earlier today have titles beginning with “some.” This was an accident, but now that I’ve noticed, I must obey.
Anyway, while driving a few weeks ago, I was passed by a maniac speeding and weaving between lanes. I use the term maniac as per the late George Carlin’s definition of slower and faster drivers, i.e. idiots and maniacs.
For some reason, I immediately thought of a Project Glass app that could identify people as bad drivers, somehow identifying them via color-coding so that you could keep your distance. On the one hand, this is inherently private information, but we all know that insurance companies employ phalanxes of actuaries to put a mathematical value on how risky a driver each of us is.
Why not surface that risk as an augmented reality (AR) overlay?
Setting aside the privacy issues for the greater good, which certainly has precedence for technological innovations, this could promote safety on the road, from both avoidance tactics and especially via negative game mechanics. If you knew you were showing up as a red, risky driver, you’d have a shame mechanic to practice safer driving, wouldn’t you? Especially if your safe driving eventually lead to a promotion to yellow or green.
Of course, the irony here is that wearing Google Glasses while driving makes you a distracted driver, so bit of a problem. Maybe Google’s driverless cars should get this app first to help their driving algorithms account for human nature a bit better.
Google’s latest self-driving vehicle, image via the official Google blog
Technology is fun. We’re living in a brave new world.
Find the comments.
Why use glasses at all. Project the stuff onto the windshield. Head Up Display. All kinds of possibilities though, agreed.
Sure, blue sky, but near-term I haven’t seen a developer-friendly heads-up display that can do anything like this. Everything I’ve seen is closed-source and sparsely-available.