July 23, 2014 at 18:49Head-Up Display for any car - how to drive safer with poor visibility
Here are the three films that I remember first when it comes to projections and holograms - Star Wars, Special Opinion, and Iron Man. My opinion about augmented reality is cool and give two. The proximity between me and Tony Stark’s helmet is about the same as between Peter I and the Moon, but I already tested my path to AR in real life - on the Opel Corsa, in bad weather, far beyond the Moscow Ring Road, with the Hudway app. Maybe not the first, but I’ll write how it was.
The principle of the application is so simple that it is not clear how no one has done this before. In general, any car owner ( read: anyone who has an iPhone and a car ) gets the opportunity to use Head-Up Display technologies without extra costs.
It’s almost space - a drawing of the road, with all its corners, is projected in real time onto the windshield. The idea is to make driving with poor visibility safer - a picture of the driver’s road right in front of him and in a way that is very easy to read. Well, focusing from the projection onto the road and back is no more difficult than from the speedometer - and I look at it very often. Yes, this is not new for the top-end car segment - BMW, Audi and a number of other automakers are already offering the Head-Up display as an integrated option. But for everyone else, HUD software that does not require separate hardware is a very cool idea.
Here is the real video at work:
To be quiet and with a navigator - http://vimeo.com/97818548
But first things first
Install Hudway for free. Probably because the application uses the public Google Maps and Open Street Map. In the Android version, Yandex.Maps are also supported.
To start is very simple - we start, select where we are going and press the "Start" button. We switch to the HUD mode and put the phone on the dashboard. Now the projection of the route and the speed of the car are displayed on the windshield.
It looks really cool - at night or in conditions of poor visibility ( heavy rain, thick fog ), since the projection is simply not visible during the day - the brightness of the smartphone is not enough.
But in the afternoon, you can navigate simply by voice prompts - a picture is quickly built up in your head, after how many meters the next turn is, where to steer and when it is time to slow down. If you allow speed correction by the accelerometer, the data obtained is much more accurate than when using only GPS.
Even the basic functionality of the application is enough for the average user, but voice prompts are a good thing, it is worth a try in action. I did not regret 30 rubles and tried the PRO mode with voice, customization and other goodies - I wanted to test a different kind of road. The flight is normal, points on the road when approaching a turn - a good idea. Plus, there was something to surprise friends at a meeting :)
About the price. In the iOS version, subscriptions are now $ 1 per month and $ 7 per year. In the Android version, the PRO mode costs $ 2, but there is no voice there yet. We will not compare warm with soft, but this is ten times less than the cost of other navigation applications.
In practice, the projection of the road onto the glass ( Head-Up Display ) really helps to drive in bad weather ( rain, fog, snowstorm) and in the dark outside the city - especially on unfamiliar winding tracks where there is no lighting. Especially good when traveling between cities - in fact, in this situation I tried. You get tired less, and in general it is somehow more comfortable. In short, if you do not have a full-time navigator, then do not buy its application and it will allow you to strain less in conditions of poor visibility and to know in advance about nearby corners and dangerous places.
There are all sorts of additional social things such as sharing a march, a table of results, etc. - I wonder if someone is useful, but not primary, so I don’t stop.
A spoon of tar
Hudway is really a very good app. But for now, he has his drawbacks. The first and most important is not even enclosed in the application, but in the need to buy a special mat that will not allow the phone to slide on the dashboard. And even in this case, you can not use Hudway on all machines, due to the design features of the panel.
The second minus is an unusual interface in some places: when different menus and settings panels appear both on the left, on the right, and on the top, this is at first confusing.
The third minus is the lack of the ability to build and rebuild routes offline. Here, it seems, you have to wait until the developers find a solution.
Where can I download?
As I said - the application is free in the basic functionality, but you will have to pay for additional buns.
PS: I ask you not to ban right away - the developers are my friends, but this does not change the essence. I tried to write objectively.