Motorcycle helmet of the future! - BMW booth - CES 2016
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
1,013 words · ~5 min read
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lus Tech tip coverage of CES 2016 is brought to you by Squarespace build it
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beautiful so behind me BMW is running a pretty cool demo where they let you get
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onto one of their motorbikes and you got some fans blowing on you and you're
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wearing this very very interesting
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connected helmet accessory that is supposed to make the riding experience
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more enjoyable and safer so I'm actually
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holding one right now this is a very early prototype device and the way that
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it works is pretty freaking cool so start at the back where they've got a
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single rear-facing camera right now this one doesn't do a whole lot but in the
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future you would be able to use this for say for example oncoming car detection
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uh blind spot checking and a number of other fantastic features even things
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like keeping track of where other riders in your group are and indicating if
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someone is falling behind behind you at
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the little hatch in the back they've got a spot for two batteries and the Prototype right now runs for about 6
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hours hours off of those two batteries the USB ports back there are for
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development purposes and it's unclear as to whether or not that would end up in
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the finished product so now let's move around to the front we find yet another
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camera this one is an integrated action cam so you can go ahead and just flip a
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switch on the bike and start recording footage of your ride I don't know
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anything about the quality of the camera at this time and I suspect BMW doesn't
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either because like I said this is a prototype but having the ability to
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record action cam footage AG directly from the point of view of the rider without having a bulky thing attached to
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your head is something that I know more than a few people will be interested in
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but of course the real magic comes right in front of the rider's eyes so that
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right there is an I mean they're saying fully transparent nothing is fully
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transparent even the most perfect glass in the world is not 100% light
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transmission but boy is it ever close to
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the Naked Eyes so this uses a small projector to the side of the right eye
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of the rider and then the light reflects internally in the glass to project an
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image out in front of the rider directly in front of their eye unlike some of the
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other smart helmets out there it puts it really right in the field of view of the
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rider which is which is supposedly okay I'm going to do the demo in a minute
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here because it's not distracting in any way but you don't have to look down at
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it and look up meaning that you don't have to refocus your eyes and you don't
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have to take your eyes away from the road the chin bar comes up and I guess
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uh it's time for us to helmet up and get this puppy
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going okay so that was a pretty cool experience it was a little unnatural
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sitting on a bike watching the road curve in front of me and having these wind blowers blowing air in my face and
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not being able to lean and not having the throttle do anything but that doesn't take away from some of the
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really really cool stuff about the demo so first of all you've got your
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speedometer right out in front of you without having to look down for it the
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way that it projects the image in front of you rather than having it right close
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to your face so that you don't have to refocus your eyes is where working
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pretty darn well so far the fact that it's using the camera to recognize
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things like changing speed limits things like construction zones really cool the
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turn-by-turn navigation being on the screen also very cool this is all
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functionality that I would absolutely love to have right now today now it's
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not perfect uh the display is still monocolor there's just uh there's just
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green text but they've got it working pretty well even in bright conditions
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which is great I think the speaker still needs some tuning so while they're there
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so you can actually accept or reject phone calls with a little toggle on the
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bike and you could listen to music with them I think they're going to have to
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find the right balance between isolating the noise around the rider and making
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sure that the rider is still safe while being able to maintain a call um and I
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guess other than that there's only two other things that bum me out I don't own
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a bike that works with it yet and it looks like it's going to be a closed ecosystem where the helmet connects to
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the bike via proprietary connection and the bike pairs to your phone via
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Bluetooth but I mean who knows maybe that could change in the near future in terms of
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what bike I'm using and number two is it's a few years before we're going to
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see a final version of this product for
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sure but I know that I for one am definitely looking forward to it so
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