Beeping cars

Cars communicate with people with only a single auditory channel, i.e. the horn. Not only is it a disturbing sound, there are also many meanings to the horn. It can signal danger, "the signal-light has turned", "I know you", "our team has won", etc. This limitation causes not only noise-pollution, but actually a dangerous situation, where people who signal "hi" with the horn cause other drives to turn their head in search of danger.

I propose expanding the auditory channels of cars. Why not have multiple buttons on the steering wheel so that each signal a different meaning: a "honk" for danger, "beep" for signal-light, "Scooby-do" for "hi, I know you". This can even start a whole chain of car ringtones. It will enrich the auditory environment and alleviate the scary stereotypical noise of a crowded city.

Obviously, there are some safety and regulation issues that must be addressed. We don't want people to start making all kind of noises all the time. But as people are now not honking all the time out of respect, fear of the law and social pressure, I believe that they will not "beep" and "Scooby-do" all of the time as well.

Augmented Vision Part I – Seeing beyond time

What happens when you take Google Street-view, Google Glass and time-lapse photography? For those few who don't know, Google Street-view is a software created by Google that captures images from many, many places in 3D format and allows people to virtually travel in other places, as if they were there. Google Glass, on the other hand, enables virtual-reality like experience, where images and information are displayed on the Glass in response to either your commands or events that are detected in the view captured by the camera on the Glass. Time-lapse photography is the art-form that captures pictures every X-second/minutes/hours and then combines them to a single video, thus allowing us to see things that happen too slow, e.g. traffic of cars over an entire day, formation of clouds, blooming of flowers.

The concept of Google Street-view is to have people from different places to experience a specific scene. The concept of Google Glass is to experience the scene they are in in different manners. The concept of time-lapse photography is to experience a specific scene in a unique perspective.

I propose the following research project. Select a place with trees, buildings and an open view of the sky and repeatedly record with Google Street-view the same place, over and over again, every minute, in a time-lapse fashion. Then create a 3D time-lapse scene of the entire place, showing the movement of the leaves, the weather formation and the buildings' dynamics. Now, enable people walking with Google Glass to view the scene from the time-lapse perspective. They can literally speed-up time and see how things around them behave in a completely new and unique fashion. Because it is captured by Street-view, the scene is completely immersive and because of the Glass the video is reactive to the view-point of the user.

If Google does not want to supply Street-view for this project, it can be done in another, automatic way using only Google Glasses, and the more Glasses the better, using the concept of Building Rome in a Day. That project took Google Images of tourists in Rome and reconstructed the entire old city of Rome in 3D, aligning all pictures and extracting the 3D information out of them. Now think of several dozens of people walking by in a specific area, wearing Google Glass and constantly recording the view they see. One can then take all of these videos and reconstruct not only the 3D scene, but actually the 4D scene, meaning also the dynamics of it. And since people pass specific places at different times, we automatically get time-lapse videos. Then, resending the same people the reconstructed videos from all other people's recorded views, will enable them to see the place they're walking in with enhance speed – seeing beyond time.