Quote:
Originally Posted by corksil
Okay fine. Pick apart my idea instead of coming up with your own. Welcome to the internet.
If you're going to stick around this forum for longer than 36 posts, please try to be more friendly and supportive of the other members on this forum.
Does anyone remember that old video game... "Halo?" --- The original one... It was a first-person-shooter and in the bottom right corner of the screen was a motion tracker. Anything within a certain radius that was moving became a red dot. When stationary, it disappeared. Anything that was considered "friendly" was a yellow dot. The size of the dot depicted the size of the moving object.
A motion tracker built into a helmet would be a nice feature.
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Whoa whoa there, I wasn't intending that post as some ill-spirited low blow at your expense. I typed it out with the intention of the post being of the nearly insurmountable barriers against such tech and why it hasn't really been aggressively tackled. I felt my response was good natured, constructive and informative criticism based on my own observation and opinion. I do believe that any idea should be feasible to some extent and keep in mind some hard boundaries like physical limitations of the user and basic laws and theories of physics and the like. Thinking up something that only a super human or modified/altered human can accomplish with said helmet isn't viable for the rest of us. I took the spirit of the OPs post to be a semi-realistic approach to improve a helmet beyond the base functions of what we have now.
I also don't know why post count should have any relevance to what I have to say. What anyone says should meet the same level of scrutiny and standards at post 1 as at post 10,000. Now if what you're saying is that because I'm "new" and I need to know that the etiquette around these forums is that a newer poster can't disagree with a poster who has been around longer quantified by "post count" then I never got that memo or seen it listed in the ToA. If that's the case and the mods agree, then maybe I wont get much further along?
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To respond in kind to the OPs inquiry, I believe that if we're going to go along the route of incorporating computer tech with helmets, I think we're pretty close to some interesting developments that I see a lot of the current tech coming out is very close to achieving.
First would be an efficiency based overlay of a route for track riding. Seeing that the new R1 has the ability to integrate a computer that gives computational data from the ECU and sensors and overlay them onto a GPS derived course to give riding data that will let the riders focus and adjust for maximum efficiency. This tech has actually been around for quite a while and used exclusively by racing teams during tests and practice to tune the machine and rider for racing and is now available to the common man as an OEM option. Awesome.
I believe using a HUD interface that uses the visor as the screen, having a computer wirelessly connected to the ECU and sensor suite along with a built in camera loaded with spatial mapping software. After a couple of configuration runs on a course, the computer can compute nearly every inch of the course and give the rider the perfect line as well as entry speed and braking points in real time on the course. It would be like the overlay you see in racing games but for the track and given in real time. it could also tell you if the turn is decreasing radius, small changes in in altitude or pitch. A simplified overlay interface like what you see in games with a couple extra markers would also help prevent the aspiring racer from getting overwhelmed by input from the overlay. You could also customize the output to more or less data "integrated" with the overlay. For example the fully integrated function of the overlay would be a color coded pathway with an X to mark the begging braking point. The colors would change as you meet he proper speed and braking pressure. For a more complex overlay, you could set the program to pull the speed function out of the overlay to give you a numerical output of speed or a numerical indication of the degree of turn or change in pitch and elevation of the road. Combined with input from the ECU and sensors throughout the bike with environmental sensors as well, it could be a powerful tool to help racers easily inch up their performance by giving them a much easier to understand graphical output that can potentially be proactive instead of just purely reactive.
For general road use, a camera/hud system as suggested above but would just instead be used to calculate and warn riders of people suddenly slamming on the brakes and the like. It would measure and look for rapid deceleration and then paint a red silhouette around the vehicle that is decelerating at a very high rate. As it stands now, you only know when someone hits the brakes but you don't know how hard until you get the visual cues and process them and react. A computer with the right software and algorithms can do the calculations and detection much quicker and flag that vehicle before your mind can process the information.
Another nifty feature could be to add in the ability for the computer to describe and layout the type of turn that's ahead by using the camera. There is a way to tell visually with high relative accuracy on the type of turn and having a computer that can do it and then relay it would be a nice feature to have when you're out and about on unfamiliar roads and may miss the visual cues that can help depict what type of turn you're facing ahead.
These are just some of my fantastical ideas which seem to kinda already be trickling in a bit in some way or other and I feel that they could be potential technologies in the near future with what I see as developing through. Sorry about the long post and all.
