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Did you know 1.25 million people die on the world’s roads in a year? In India, there is one road death every four minutes. These numbers might shock you, but they won’t make you a better driver or more alert while on the road. It’s only when an accident hits you or a loved one that you are forced to act. That’s what happened to Sunil Vallath.
He was a young man, utterly in love with his fiancée, Parvathy Sreekumar. They used to talk endlessly on the phone, even while driving. He was on the other end of the phone when she had an accident. She escaped unhurt but it shook Vallath up. It still gives him shivers to think of what could’ve happened if luck had run out on them that morning. The incident got the engineer in him thinking about a less distracting hands-free device that could help one stay connected without taking one’s eyes off the road. That led to Exploride.
In the ideal world, we would want to focus on the road completely while driving. But that is rarely the case on the ground. Apart from dealing with calls, music, or radio, there are the map-based navigators. Think of the Uber driver constantly glancing at his GPS-enabled smartphone attached somewhere above or beside him.
The device that Vallath built – Exploride – is a transparent heads-up display (HUD) for cars. (An HUD presents information without requiring users to look away from their usual viewpoints.) Exploride lets you access music and maps, take or decline calls, change volume, read texts, and get alerts on a transparent panel fixed on top of the dashboard. And guess what, you can control it all with gestures and voice.
This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here.
