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Comment by miahi | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I understand what the product is and what it does - it seems more like a technology looking for a market.

Is this a product that end users (car owners) could buy? How would it be integrated with the car? As a driver who doesn't care about cyclists (as those are the ones causing most accidents), would you buy a specific device just for avoiding cyclists?

Is it a product car manufacturers have to integrate in the car? Shouldn't this have a wider target than cyclists? How does it compare to the existing collision avoidance systems? If it's an optional safety system just for detecting cyclists, how do you sell it to the car buyer?

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Yep, the article is very unclear about that. From the Luxonis site

https://discuss.luxonis.com/d/8-it-works-working-prototype-o...

> So the final product is a multi-camera, rear-facing bike-light, which uses object detection and depth mapping to track the cars behind you

It's for the cyclist.

I'm both a car driver and a cyclist. I wonder if I want something like this on my bike and be unnecessarily scared by false positives (cars do get close to bicycles all the times and what can I do anyway?) or on my car just in case I don't notice a bicycle with no lights at night (plenty of them here.)

Ok, so it's a camera implementation of the Garmin Varia bike radar, with special functions to scare away drivers. Yes, as you say, a false positive would be really annoying for both cyclists and the drivers, as they can blind them and actually create an accident (what happens when you suddenly see a powerful flashing light during the night? flashing lights on bikes are annoying enough as they are, without an extra-powerful setting).

> I wonder if I want something like this on my bike and be unnecessarily scared by false positives

Right?

Also a cyclist, I can totally imagine this going (uselessly) wild when I do something like lane-slip through peak-hour traffic in the city.

And also if the horn goes off, would that make agri drivers more so? I used to have an air horn on my bike - it sounded like a lorry horn, and the issue was that drivers heard it and would stop but would normally assume it wasn't from me, and would carry on.

That's a really good point, it would definitely escalate aggressive drivers.

I've had situations where I rode past someone (they were stopped in traffic), then they passed me again down the road (this repeated a couple of times) and every time I rolled past them, they'd descend further into apoplectic rage, I can't imagine flashing lights is going to help.

I can imagine: they think they paid their car 100 times more than our bicycles (actually maybe only 10), they know they could go 10 times as fast as a bicycle (maybe only 5) and yet they are stuck in the traffic, go as slow as us and won't be at home much earlier (or much later.)

When it happens to me to be a car driver I think that at least I'm enjoying heating or air conditioning but I'd like to be on my bicycle at least until I get out of the city.

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