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Motorbike helmet with navigation

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64 pointsdevy51 comments

This would great and worth consideration if helmets weren't disposable items. Obviously a crash will cause a write-off (and good luck convincing insurance your helmet was $2000). But helmets get stinky, they get dropped, they get exposed to UV. A five year replacement cycle is recommended by the Snell Foundation. [1] Okay, so $400/year; some folks will part with that. You'll cry real tears if you drop it hard enough to crack that carbon fiber shell.

Then there's fit. Some people have a Shoei head, some an Arai head (helmet brands). For $2000, that sucker better not cause hot spots on my noggin.

Replacement shields? Shields are consumables, IMO. And I want a dark one for sunny days, a light one for when I'm out after dark. I want a new one when the original gets scratched up.

I like the idea, but a cool HUD is just one thing to consider when buying a helmet, and not high on my personal list if I'm wearing the thing up to twelve hours a day.

[1] http://www.smf.org/helmetfaq#aWhyReplace

From your link:

>Additionally, experience indicates there will be a noticeable improvement in the protective characteristic of helmets over a five- year period due to advances in materials, designs, production methods and the standards.

As a person who doesn't know a lot about motorcycling I found that surprising. Helmets seemed to me like an item the quality of which must have had plateaued a long time ago. But then again, you might naively think that about swimsuits.

For me the biggest concern I had when I looked at this was to what degree it could compromise the safety characteristics of the helmet, in particular:

1/ Anything that reduces the amount of compression available from the internal foam will significantly reduce the main benefit of a helmet in reducing brain damage.

2/ Anything that increases weight will aggrivate the main drawback of a helmet (giving your head more leverage to wrench your spine in an accident).

3/ Similarly any tethering or external modules are going to risk wrenching your neck in the event of an off.

It looks incredibly cool but I can't help but think it compromises most of the safety value I wear a helmet for in the first place.

Good points. I guess the only thing new to a helmet industry is the projector. Everything else can be found in high-tech helmets already. Check the Schuberth C2 with bluetooth inlay. I wonder if the projector can even be placed outside the protective hull and shine in through a hole? That will mitigate the point 1.

Safety gear is great and I wear a lot of it when I ride, but on a motorcycle you really depend on avoiding accidents -- The gear only helps so much compared to a car. It is sort of like picking the fast and nimble vehicle in a videogame instead of the tank -- except you actually die or get hurt.

Therefore distractions are perhaps the biggest safety concern (in particular here in south Florida, everyone is out to get me :-) ). I could see the view that maybe not worrying about navigating is actually less of distraction, but for me I don't think that would be the case. Every second I would spend looking at the HUD is a second I'm not:

  * Looking for someone making a left hand turn right in front me
  * Noticing who is texting while driving
  * Noticing stuff on the road that could result in a loss of traction
  * Watching Cars with stuff that might fall off in front of me
  * Observing people that look like they might run a light
  * Focusing on good control of the bike
  * Planning Escape Routes
  * etc....

In short, accident avoidance in the long run takes constant focus (and unfortunately, a bit of luck too).

In your opinion, would a voice-based contextually aware device be a big enough distraction/safety reduction to offset it's value?

Or haptics?

That is an interesting idea. I still wouldn't want the distraction myself (rather just pull over, take out my phone, figure it out, and get back on the road). However, I'm a pretty new rider (about 1500 miles on the bike). More experienced riders very well might feel a lot different.

Nope, with over 200K miles and multiple trips across the continental US (I don't care if I ever cross Nebraska again), I don't feel a whole lot differently. In a car, sure, I'll try to maximize efficiency and minimize stopping. On a bike, it's not going to ruin my day to pull over and take a 5 minute break to look at a map/phone. I'm not on a bike to be in a hurry, or even to hit a particular destination a lot of the time.

I've used a GPS on a bike since the mid-late 90s. To me, the use case is completely different than in a car. I'm not driving a rental from the airport to the hotel, and I'm rarely trying to find something in a major city. On a bike the GPS is a nice-to-have tool. But it is not so essential that I'll spend a lot of money, or require it to be constantly displayed on my visor.

This is also pretty easy to do today with an ear-piece and a Garmin.

Heads up is only really helful for the edge-case that is not apparent. Ie, it helps you pre-visualize something. It might be something that is like a blind-corner + turn. Or it might be a confusing intersection (5-way). Or a left hand exit, et. This would help you set-up the right way ahead of time. Rather than just telling you XYZ at the last minutre.

You need a time/distance dynamic lead-time tho, and it is this that current GPS systems suck at. The hard part is just getting the software right. It's a distraction if its not at the right-place + right time.

For example TomTom Rider does a good job of doing exactly that - it shows you the lines mapping for exits etc. I have it hooked up over bluetooth too. Works most of the time. Worked well for me in US and Europe.

You can do that today with a Bluetooth headset helmet and a smartphone.

I recently got back into regularly riding (I now regularly commute to/from work on my motorcycle) and I completely agree. However, I absolutely would love to have a HUD, but not anything people keep thinking you need a HUD for. A decent GPS unit + bluetooth or smartphone + bluetooth is good enough for those "I got lost, now need to get home" rides. I don't want any sort of communication provided on it. I want a real HUD, giving me real time, easily interpreted information about what's going on around me.

I envision something closer to aircraft/fighter aircraft HUDs:

  * Roll indicator
  * "target indicator" (in this case, any non-stationary object).  Can be as simple as a diamond shape near the center of the detected target
  * Visual indicator of direction/speed of the target (something like a line from the diamond as a 3d projection for where the diamond will be in 4 seconds based on current speed/direction)
  * Similar direction/speed indicator for you

If done with thin lines (like all the aircraft huds), all the same color, it presents a substantial amount of useful information in an easy to process/digest way without being overly distracting. But, definitely not an easy problem to solve, it's just what I'd like to see.

All of the HUDs I see coming out (Google glass included) seem geared towards providing you information to distract you from what you're doing, not enhance it, which is the opposite of what I want.

You're absolutely right. I've been riding a motorcycle for something like 30 years now (in Paris!) and I'm still alive. Over the years you develop a sense not unlike The Shining; you know who's driving the car in front of you, where it's going and what its driver is doing, with only a glance.

And yet, is driving assistance that distracting? I think I could get used to it (and in any case would only need it on long trips to a place I don't know already).

The objection that a helmet is completely disposable seems more relevant; maybe they should develop only a shield that you could attach to your helmet when you need it (or a device that would work with any helmet)...?

As a rider, I'm worried about what happens to the electronics, projector (+ lens/ bulb), reflectors, and screen in case of an accident. If the helmet deforms, will those shatter, possibly scattering shards around while my head is bouncing in there?

I would absolutely love this, but I'd wait to see what the actual crash tests look like before risking my head to one.

Edit: thinking about this more, I'm even more worried trusting my safety to a company that has never even made a helmet before. I'd be much more confident if they had approached older helmet manufacturers and worked in conjunction to get these new features into something thats confidently safe.

The focus on battery life, charging, UI and menu systems also makes me wary -- there's almost nothing about safety in the presentation, except for the material ('carbon fiber'), and nothing at all on crash testing.

I would not risk my head to this.

This sounds like a solution to a problem that doesn't exist in reality.

You basically only ever actually need navigation when driving/riding in a foreign city that you don't know yet. If you're on a cycle, using headphones to receive audible instructions should suffice (unless you spend most of your days riding foreign cities).

If you know the city instead, you generally know its quirks better than any navigator.

If you're travelling on highways you can just take a look at the map on your phone and preplan the few next turns in advance. When on a cycle, it's easy to just pull over and check where you are and whether that little road will take you in and out of some location.

I would worry about this obscuring vision at a bad time.

Depending upon how they do it, I don't think it would be a big deal, if you had a small road up overtop of say a tree, you would still clearly see the tree behind it.

Assuming that it is not a very "strong" image, I assume it has some transparency?

This concern does not seem to have deterred air forces from putting head-up-displays in front of pilots. The primary goal of a HUD in a cockpit is to keep you from needing to go head-down and lose any chance of seeing something important happening outside the cockpit. Better to have something small momentarily obscured than have you looking away completely. That said, I'm not sure motorcyclists have a constant need to perform instrument scans that take them head-down in the first place. I'd be wary of the urge to put too much information up on the display just because it looks cool, or because you can...

Air force pilots are trained to use a HUD. Motorcycle pilots aren't. A HUD is probably ideal if you are used to it, but I fear the first hours.

Ideally, this should be tested.

This technology has been available in Cadillacs for years. Go drive an ATS if you want to see it in action. Not distracting at all.

ATS HUD: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpXYwoZ6zWw

For a while they even had a radar overlay so you could see deer in the road on your HUD before your eyes could in the dark.

Looks like the Cadillac HUD is fairly low on the windshield:

http://cdn0.mos.techradar.futurecdn.net//art/car%20tech/Head...

Actually, I've talked quite a bit with folks who were at NASA an building next generation heads up displays that were 'constant field of view', their conclusion (and they design stuff for Attack Helicopter pilots) was that the display has to put things into the environment rather than having it display static things, this allows the pilot to look at the environment rather than look at the display.

An example of how that worked in the military sense, the eye piece would put a targeting diamond over a target while you were looking at it and would be either clear, or light up a single pixel on the edge of the screen where you would have to look to see the diamond(s).

On fighter yets the hud is fixed over the cockpit 'dash' and doesn't move relative to your head, so when you look out of the cockpit it isn't in front of your eyes.

The conclusions NASA came to was that locating stuff and anchoring it in space around the pilot was essential in keeping the pilot from losing situational awareness and instead looking at the display on the glass.

In the Russian helmet, they would need some way to combine your GPS location, and head orientation, to perhaps put virtual cones in the road in front of you showing you where to go.

Some anecdotes from a military pilot friend: Pilots transitioning back to civilian life sometimes get into accidents on the road because they're so used to being "heads down" on their instruments. When you're flying a jet in the sky, there's not really anything you can run into, so you get used to that sort of behavior.

Its in my center view hence I do not care for it. Give me information in my periphery, nothing to distract from what I am looking at in my standard fov.

I am already used to glancing down for speed and such on occasion, I really don't want something elsewhere. There is just too much chance of it impeding my view at the wrong time. Its already annoying when that one damn bug impacts that spot your looking through all the time.

Agreed.

I think the best solution for GPS on a bike is probably Google Maps on some sort of phone receiving input from it only through TTS over headphones in your helmet. If you needed to interact with it you would just pull over first. Everything needed for that solution probably exists already.

This is already how I do navigation while in my car, though in a few (increasingly rare) cases I still find myself looking at the screen for clarification. Iron out those cases and screen-less will become the best way to use navigation.

I use google maps from my iPhone bluetoothing to my helmet. Very effective and not distracting. This solution is dreadfully dangerous IMHO.

I ride motorbike for about a year now. In the beginning having a navigation hints voice over bluetooth was the only way. Now when I'm confident driving I can just use the navi mounted on the handlebar. Just have to look at it now and then. So I think all time on navigation on the visor is a bit too much. If they would find a way of keeping just an arrow most of the time and only show a map when needed ...

Same here, I just use a map in my tank bag, and check the directions on google maps beforehand (that includes looking at some potentially problematic intersections on street view, which is incredibely helpful.) Also here in France the signs on the streets are usually really good.

And I didn't choose to ride a motorbike over driving a car to be in a hurry, I enjoy it a lot more and taking my time is not a problem.

Especially in a new country or a city this kind of a care-free navigation is a nice feature. You really have to concentrate on what happens around you in a new city. People have distinct driving styles in between cities and countries and one just can not foresee what will happen next second. Also the street marks are different - you really need to grok the new style.

It's not SNELL certified, most serious riders won't consider it.

Good point, but if they're willing to iterate a little on the physical construction, I don't see why they couldn't pass SNELL.

(Unless part of the certification is "dont put potentially sharp bits that could fall off in a crash inside the helmet")

Exactly my first thought. Most people are buying helmets as helmets first and foremost. This is like a GPS system that weakens your seatbelt as a side-effect of installation. Also, the website doesn't instill confidence. I'd drop $2k on one from Icon or AGV or Shoei, but not a technology startup.

Snell isn't the end-all of helmet certifications, and I consider it a myth that Snell is the best certification. I'd post a link to the Motorcycle Consumer News article on the topic if I knew where to begin to find it. It was incredibly in-depth article from about five or six years ago that concluded that no certification is right for all conditions, and DOT-only is arguably just fine. There are crashes where you'll be wishing the helmet were Snell-certified, and some where you'll come out better with DOT.

It's not either or. Most helmets are both DOT and SNELL certified(at least the good ones are).

Projectors tend to put out a lot of heat. I would worry that my head would get hot wearing it. I would also be concerned about the weight.

While HUDs are cool; there is a reason that most major automobile manufacturers haven't put them in a car yet and the reason is not to do with new technology because HUDs have been around for a long time. The reason is that anything that goes between you and the windshield will obstruct your view. Any coating that is required to reflect the light from the projector to your eyes will interfere with light from the road even with the projector turned off. You have one fatal crash wearing this helmet and the insurance companies will make mincemeat out of this company. I'm guessing that $2000 doesn't include much for the company to put towards an insurance premium.

Also, no integrated cameras ? Rear facing camera ?

I'm sure I'm not the only one to notice the outstanding similarities between the project's site and a real, legitimate Indiegogo campaign. But after a brief search I can't find any mentions of Indiegogo, just the hotlinked favicon. Even the perks themselves aren't clickable (nitpick mode: they are clickable but don't lead anywhere).

The key question here is the ergonomics. It takes time to adjust you focus near-far and you can't just stick a GPS on your shield and make it work. It is distracting and dangerous. Cockpit HUDs have different spatial relationships with your eyes.

Wait until you hit 40. I wonder if my old eyes could even focus the HUD at all.

HUDs use light focused at infinity so the point of focus for your eyes doesn't change when looking at the display (it "hovers" mid-air). Holographic sites, HUDs, Google Glass all use the same principle, with varying ways of getting the light onto your eye (curved mirror that changes the focal point of the light properly that reflects on a piece of glass, a piece of glass curved to focus the light properly when it's projected on it and a lens on the projector to focus the light properly are the 3 primary approaches).

Has anyone ever addressed focal distance? Constantly refocusing my eyes from road distance to display distance is going to cause fatigue much sooner in addition to decreased safety due to lack of attention on the road.

At the cost involved it might be worth retro-fitting a Google Glass instead of a proprietary helmet and unproven navigation system (motorcyclists are picky about helmets).

Glass isn't a HUD.

Yes it is, it's a Display that allows you to keep your Head Up, and on the road in this case of the motorcycle.

"A head-up display or heads-up display—also known as a HUD—is any transparent display that presents data without requiring users to look away from their usual viewpoints."

With glass you have to look UP and the screen is almost never on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-up_display

Also the glass explorers / motorcycle riders I know are worried about the glass prism impacting their eye or face during an accident.

The helmet keeps your head inside and the rest of the world out during a crash, so putting more "stuff" (especially sharp glass/electronics) in it could be dangerous.

Saw their booth at TC Disrupt. Looked pretty cool. Wanted to try, but no one was available.

They were at San Francisco Motorcycle Club's general meeting last Thursday. They were giving people demos. I don't get it, really. When I ride, I like lo-tech :-)

There is space for antiquity and for nice new precision tools. Lo-tech was high-tech at some point of time too.

still searching for a "pedestrians-safety-range-extender" for my kids, something about in a 100feet range slowing the car to step speed...

may be you should start looking for a time accelerater instead? :-)

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