Gadgetory

- tech tips coverage of CES 2016 is brought to you by Squarespace build it beautiful so behind me BMWs running a pretty cool dental where they let you get on to 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 freakin cool so we'll 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 a blind spot checking and a number of other fantastic features even things like keeping track of where other riders in your group are in indicating if someone is falling behind behind you at the little hatch in the back they've got a spot for two batteries in the prototype right now runs for about six 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 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 riders 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 eye 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 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 it's time for us to helm it 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 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 the display is still mono color there's just 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 the 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 and I guess other than that there's only two other things that bummed 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 a 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 I'm definitely looking forward to it so don't miss any of our CES 2016 coverage by making sure you're subscribed over at Linus tech tips and a huge shout out to Squarespace oh yeah my shirt oh yeah there they are Squarespace for allowing us to be here at so remember guys you're building a beautiful website you're gonna want to head over to squarespace.com slash Linus use offer code Linus to save 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