iPhone ARider: a head-up display for your bike?
Never get lost on the way to the trendy bar again
iPhone ARider
The Apple iPhone is capable of some pretty cool stuff and we've seen plenty of people developing cases and chargers for keeping your iPhone with you on the go. The coolest bike application we've seen yet though is definitely the ARider HUD. The app uses the Google mapping and compass functions of the phone to feed a realtime map to an eyepiece that acts as a Head-up display.
There's a couple of obvious flaws to this prototype, the brainchild of Japanese innovators Ubiquitous Entertainment. the first is that the iPhone is currently placed on top of the helmet where it's a little, well, exposed. Also the compass would react to every turn of your head which would make the mapping confusing. It'd probably be better to mount the phone on the bike (or in a backpack) and run the cables up to the eyepiece.
The other drawback is the fact that it's not really a head-up display: you can't see through the eyepiece to the road, so it's obscuring one eye, presumably making all-important depth and speed perception much harder. We're not sure if there's a way round that... anyway, here's the video.
And if you fall off, you could end up with an iphone shaped hole in your head. I'm not sure why helmet lights and cameras are allowed to be honest because they pose serious safety issues and this device falls into the same category.
OldRidgeback
Chumpy at best. I see mapmyride and doing an I-Phone app for mile gatherers like myself, but that encourages a bar mount.
I've been using a variety of iPhone cycling GPS apps recently (mainly because I cannot afford a Garmin yet!). My iPhone gets put into my back pocket as I cannot face the prospect of a bike mount. I'm too freaked I will trash the phone! 
Has anyone ever tried writing in small writing on their hand and trying to read it a couple of centemeters infront of your eye? pretty hard huh.
I'm dubious about this product. unless the Japaneese have discovered a way to squash the lenses in your eye to allow you to focus closer...
yep, no good for long sighted types like me - I suppose we'll have to wait until they do away with the phone and simply stick a chip in our heads instead so that the information is tranmitted right into the bit of your cerebral cortex the deals with vision etc… which will be nice. Coming soon apparently if the people who's job it is to predict the future of technology are to be believed. Mind you, they also said that we'd have paper-less offices and that keyboards would be a thing of the past and I'm still tapping away from beneath a small hill of dried wood pulp.
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