Gadgetory

California and Nevada have either past or have pending legislation that will permit wait for it self-driving cars yes it's real it's not fake it's not science fiction it's here today and who is the company that's driving this awesome tech it's google yes not only do they want to be able to index everything they also want to drive you down the road to get that gallon of milk or maybe some more lofty stuff it's actually pretty cool with a self-driving car you can do all kinds of stuff you can reduce driver distraction unless maybe you're playing a game on your Android that's driving your car but we're not going to go there you can also improve fuel efficiency by knowing terrain by knowing speed limits by knowing road conditions by knowing that the condition of your tires if they're full if they're not you can do all kinds of stuff you can also compress the cars on a given stretch of road so that you don't have to have as much following distance because a computer with a high-speed camera can anticipate distances a lot faster than the human brain and human eyes can I'm not making this stuff up lots of cool reasons why you'd want to do that I don't have a self-driving car I'd love to take you out there and show you in my Prius or whatever I mean my Ferrari that it can drive itself but I don't have that but what do I have I've got an android galaxy nexus and an app that'll make my driving just a little bit safer and it kind of gets us an insight into what Google is doing with their self driving cars why don't we go take a look so we fired up the app the first thing that we've got here is how to mount our phone we need to make sure that we are mounted at 90 degrees this way and 90 degrees this way and I think I've gotten that as close as I can go ahead and say next now it's showing us some safety indications and alerts some information that we've got here so our headway monitor simply shows us how much distance in seconds we have between us and the vehicle in front of us and anywhere from red being bad to green being you're just fine we have collision alerts again just to tell us hey this is your fallen to close this is dangerous and then if you're staying on your road or going off the road or out of your lane quick settings we can use this 24 7 and what that does is it is essentially runs a service in the background where it looks at your GPS to see how fast you're going and if you're traveling at speed it'll automatically launch the app so you don't have to kind of cool you can direct calls to the speaker in the device so essentially turn on the phone the speakerphone that's nice I on road narrator reads incoming notifications and text messages you can set that speed limit can let you know when you're speeding I'm in the US so we measure that in miles per hour in Utah we have a couple 80 mile-an-hour zones so I'm going to go ahead and leave that right there at 85 miles an hour if I go faster than that it will warn me now big disclaimers all over the place it says this does not replace safe driving habits it's not responsible for yada yada yada it's not that automated driving system that we were talking about earlier so now this is our car interface you remember way back when we have those car interfaces on our phones well here it is again searching for GPS right now we've got big buttons to go into phone into navigation playing music I don't know why you'd want your photo gallery here while you're driving I don't think that's a good idea of course we've got our compass it's got a GPS fix now and it knows that I'm not going anywhere i'm sitting in the driveway so let's go ahead and hit this big go I've button so here we go it's my evening commute and you can see I've got this green stripe in front of me that kind of is shaped like a trapezoid now that stripe is just telling me where the lane is you can see it's kind of trying to guess where the edge of the road is and it goes over and it looks at where the amber stripe is down in the middle of the road that helps me know when I'm drifting in and out of my lane of course if I'm looking at the display on my phone to do that which I'm not so it has alerts and alarms that will tell me when I'm when I'm drifting out of my lane now what you also saw there was a little pop-up that said something like 1.3 seconds it's seen the car ahead of me and it knows based on my current gps based speed how close I am to to that car in front of me and it's giving me a notification to let me know how close I am so there you go a first-hand look at what augmented driving with an android app looks like really on the road what it can do to kind of help out and some of its limitations now the app name if you didn't catch that before is called I on road spelled the letter I on road all smooshed together there's a white version which is free so you can try it and see if you like it the version that we showed you today was the paid version it's 499 us at least it was at the time we filmed this video so you can go ahead and grab that a couple things you're going to want to know you will need a car dock there's just no ifs ands or buts about that if you don't have one this isn't going to work your car dock is going to have to allow your phone to see down the road that means the away facing camera has to have a clear view of the road in front of you some docs have the little suction cup mount in the way some docs cover that up because who's taken pictures when you're driving honestly except us okay you're also going to need a doc that is adjustable so that you can have it plumb and level the front of the phone has to be perfectly plump and the top of the phone has to be perfectly level that's how it gauges its distances and whatnot if you get those off a little bit it's not going to work it's going to miss measure things and trust me that's a bigger step than it sounds okay last but not least you're going to have to point your phone straight down the road that sounds simple enough but by doing that you're kind of tilting away from you the driver so you might need to reposition the doc just a little bit to make it more visible to you especially when you've got light and glare coming in the last item of note there are some states and some localities that do not let you put stuff on your windshield I'm not making this up suction cups aren't allowed lcds aren't allowed California so instead you get a kind of a dash doc and you put the phone on the dash which is right in front of the windshield and somehow that's legal but putting it on the windshield isn't anybody out there a politician come on guys really anyway so what do you think of this cool not cool would you go out and buy this and get the whole set up and drive off with it all the time maybe you'd like to do this with say a teenager who's just starting to drive so that they can have a little bit more help making sure they don't run into that Mercedes in front of them I want to know now's your chance head over to pocketnow.com follow the link right down there if you're watching this on the YouTube video if you're already on pocketnow.com thank you very much big thumbs up for you so everybody hit the big thumbs up button down there okay leave us comments over at pocketnow.com about if this is something that you're interested in would you do this would you not why wouldn't you do this would you do this for teenagers who are just learning how to drive if you're a parent or maybe you're another teenager who doesn't like your friends driving I don't know let us know over the comments cool I think so 4-pocket now I'm Joe Levi thanks for watching