Hm, a lot of information on top of the visual and tactile ones when riding a bike, e.g. navigation information, extra rearview information, calling information, and so on, as can be seen in the video. But in different situations such an helmet can be very helpful I know.
see skullyhelmets.com, via GIZMODO.de
Ford (in co-operation with Microsoft) provides an interesting human-machine interface for their cars called Ford SYNC. The driver mostly controls this interface with his voice (apparently except the volume level) and with that he is able to call people from (connected smart)phone book, get through radio news, be led to a unknown business location and so on.
Ford doesn’t have a lot of visual output of navigational data nor tactile interface. And I think that’s because they don’t want to distract the driver in such way. But so they have to do a lot of communication processes in an auditive way and the driver has to remember many things (menu options, etc.). Thinking about his options is mentally demanding and this is also distracting the driver from the traffic, from my point of view. That’s also the case if the driver lets read out the options by the ‘car’ because he has to focus to that.
I don’t like this interface really well. In my view the perfect interface is multimodal and therefore balanced with more visual and also tactile elements.
[ford.com: Ford SYNC]
PS: Why the most of auditive machine outputs are female?
Printing stuff in 3D is a exciting way to innovations. The research assistant Amit Zoran of the MIT Media Lab has printed a flute with this technology. After 3D software design the printing process of the first functional prototype took about 15 hours. The result ist impressing because of the complex structure of a flute (I think).
As Zoran said in his video “the new technologies can enable new designs that are not durable otherwise and may help to develop new acoustic experiences“. His design draft (at the end of the video) looks interesting and lets one divine many more devices we only know by science fiction romans respectively can’t imagine yet.
[media.mit.edu: MIT Media Lab]
It’s great to see that disabled persons are integrated in normal life. The video shows how a (blind)human-machine interface can be built so that the people are able to program software. (The video also shows how they are teached to do so.)
[www.siue.edu – A.M. Stefik: Dissertation (2008, PDF)]
This is an old concept but seems to have (funny) capabilities for future interaction: