Idea Blog #4

I was driving around near Google yesterday trying to find my buddy's office building to meet him for dinner. Not knowing the location, I was relying on the onboard GPS device of my Acura TSX to help me find the correct route. As many of you might know, the interchanges around HW 101 and Mountain View can sometimes get clogged and, for the poor navigators among us, pretty confusing. I noticed that I was continuously looking down at the GPS screen and back up to the road, and this often seemed dangerous since cars were constantly slipping back and forth across multiple lanes each second. So now I'm thinking there might be a better way to display the nav data than on a dash-mounted or center-imbedded display. Remember an article in Business 2.0 (9/2006 "The 20 Smartest Companies to Start Now") about head-up displays in automobiles, I started to wonder if such a technology could be applied to GPS navigation. The concept is to have all direction information displayed in an HUD format so that not only is the data right in front of your eyes, but also overlaid on the actual streets themselves. From the driver's perspective, the "correct" route to take would literally be highlighted on the road to indicate clearly where to turn, exit, or merge. One could image a softly lit 3D arrow displayed to seem as if it were laying on the road itself.