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beautiful so behind me BMW is running a pretty cool demo where they let you get
onto one of their motorbikes and you got some fans blowing on you and you're
wearing this very very interesting
connected helmet accessory that is supposed to make the riding experience
more enjoyable and safer so I'm actually
holding one right now this is a very early prototype device and the way that
it works is pretty freaking cool so start at the back where they've got a
single rear-facing camera right now this one doesn't do a whole lot but in the
future you would be able to use this for say for example oncoming car detection
uh blind spot checking and a number of other fantastic features even things
like keeping track of where other riders in your group are and indicating if
someone is falling behind behind you at
the little hatch in the back they've got a spot for two batteries and the Prototype right now runs for about 6
hours hours off of those two batteries the USB ports back there are for
development purposes and it's unclear as to whether or not that would end up in
the finished product so now let's move around to the front we find yet another
camera this one is an integrated action cam so you can go ahead and just flip a
switch on the bike and start recording footage of your ride I don't know
anything about the quality of the camera at this time and I suspect BMW doesn't
either because like I said this is a prototype but having the ability to
record action cam footage AG directly from the point of view of the rider without having a bulky thing attached to
your head is something that I know more than a few people will be interested in
but of course the real magic comes right in front of the rider's eyes so that
right there is an I mean they're saying fully transparent nothing is fully
transparent even the most perfect glass in the world is not 100% light
transmission but boy is it ever close to
the Naked Eyes so this uses a small projector to the side of the right eye
of the rider and then the light reflects internally in the glass to project an
image out in front of the rider directly in front of their eye unlike some of the
other smart helmets out there it puts it really right in the field of view of the
rider which is which is supposedly okay I'm going to do the demo in a minute
here because it's not distracting in any way but you don't have to look down at
it and look up meaning that you don't have to refocus your eyes and you don't
have to take your eyes away from the road the chin bar comes up and I guess
uh it's time for us to helmet up and get this puppy
going okay so that was a pretty cool experience it was a little unnatural
sitting on a bike watching the road curve in front of me and having these wind blowers blowing air in my face and
not being able to lean and not having the throttle do anything but that doesn't take away from some of the
really really cool stuff about the demo so first of all you've got your
speedometer right out in front of you without having to look down for it the
way that it projects the image in front of you rather than having it right close
to your face so that you don't have to refocus your eyes is where working
pretty darn well so far the fact that it's using the camera to recognize
things like changing speed limits things like construction zones really cool the
turn-by-turn navigation being on the screen also very cool this is all
functionality that I would absolutely love to have right now today now it's
not perfect uh the display is still monocolor there's just uh there's just
green text but they've got it working pretty well even in bright conditions
which is great I think the speaker still needs some tuning so while they're there
so you can actually accept or reject phone calls with a little toggle on the
bike and you could listen to music with them I think they're going to have to
find the right balance between isolating the noise around the rider and making
sure that the rider is still safe while being able to maintain a call um and I
guess other than that there's only two other things that bum me out I don't own
a bike that works with it yet and it looks like it's going to be a closed ecosystem where the helmet connects to
the bike via proprietary connection and the bike pairs to your phone via
Bluetooth but I mean who knows maybe that could change in the near future in terms of
what bike I'm using and number two is it's a few years before we're going to
see a final version of this product for
sure but I know that I for one am definitely looking forward to it so
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