New Garmin Bike Headset Gives you a Heads Up on Traffic Coming up Behind You

From bike helmets to reflector lights, there’s plenty out there intended to keep those bike bound safe. There are even smart devices which offer information on number of miles “biked” and calories burnt. Despite all of that, Garmin has figured out a new angle when it comes to smart headsets.

Here at the Garmin booth (#35811) at CES 2016 in Las Vegas, they’ve unveiled a new headset that gives you not only traffic information on what’s ahead of you but also traffic in your rearview, meaning behind you (that clarification was for the layman). With this feature, cyclists have an added layer of security on those long bike rides or through the treachery that is city biking.

Known as Varia Vision this slick device attaches to either side of your sunglasses to give you a heads up display right in your line of vision. Unlike some other smart devices that attach to your handlebars making for a less than optimum experience.

You can be alerted to phone notifications, performance stats, navigational directions (how’s that for redundant?), speed and of course what’s going on traffic-wise behind you. As long as you’re paired to Varia rearview radar, you can be warned about vehicles and such that are coming up from behind you.

Garmin VP of worldwide sales, Dan Bartel expressed the importance of having in-sight displays, “We’re extremely excited to announce the next device in our line of innovative Varia cycling awareness products – the Varia Vision in-sight display. Cyclists can now easily view their data and receive alerts during a ride without needing to take their eyes off the road ahead.”

With its compact size, 8 hours of battery life and wet-weather and glove friendly touch panel the Varia Vision has been made incredibly convenient.

The proof of course is in the pudding or…actually the proof is in the practical use of the thing. Pudding is irrelevant unless you’re biking to burn off the guilt-laden pint of chocolate pudding you just devoured along with your feelings. But I digress. The proof is in whether or not the Varia Vision works well on the road.

We haven’t had a chance yet to test one of these puppies out while cycling. The concept admittedly is cool though. You can pick one up some time in the first quarter of this year atbuy.garmin.com for $399.99.

Driverless Ford solves snow problem

Motoring giant Ford says it has conducted series of successful tests of its driverless cars in snowy conditions.

The company said it had been running sensor tests for over a year, but was now driving autonomous cars in a controlled, snowy environment.Snow presents a challenge to driverless cars because the sensors they use to detect road markings and hazards do not work well in wintery weather.

Google has also been testing its autonomous vehicles in the snow.
Driverless cars use Light Detection and Ranging (Lidar) sensors to build a detailed view of the world around them.Lidar works by rapidly firing laser light away from the car and measuring how much light is reflected back - a similar principle to radar, which uses radio waves instead.

But these sensors do not work well in snowy conditions, and the car's onboard cameras cannot see road markings covered by snow.Ford said it had instead programmed the Lidar sensors to detect landmarks above the ground, such as buildings and road signs.The car could then compare this information to an existing high-resolution map of the road - generated by autonomous cars during more favourable weather- stored in its computer.

This allowed the car to navigate the road even when visibility was poor.Ford is the first manufacturer to test its vehicles in a model city built by the University of Michigan."We're used to the conditions changing very rapidly. As humans, we understand that happens all the time and we know how to deal with it," said Greg Stevens, who leads driver assistance research at Ford.

"We need to ensure that our autonomous vehicles can also deal with those situations in the same way."

Innovations

Rival car manufacturers such as Tesla, as well as technology giants Uber and Google, are also testing self-driving vehicles.Tesla has already released a car with an "autopilot" feature that can take over driving on some roads.On Sunday, the company revealed that it was developing an app that would let owners summon their car from a distance.

Tesla's Model S and X cars can already drive themselves out of a garage when summoned, but the company's owner, Elon Musk, told the BBC that people would eventually be able to summon their car across thousands of miles.

The Ehang 184 is a self-piloting drone you can ride inside

Drones are currently best at carrying cameras for recording (sometimes-illicit) videos of sunsets, skyscrapers and sporting events, and, well, not much else.


The future, though,will probably see our skies grow increasingly cloudy with swarms of actually-useful drones: Amazon (and many others) want to use drones to carry packages, and quadcopters that follow you around (Intel), launch from theback of trucks (Ford and DJI) and fly like planes (Parrot) have already been unveiled this week at CESin Las Vegas.The future, though,will probably see our skies grow increasingly cloudy with swarms of actually-useful drones: Amazon (and many others) want to use drones to carry packages, and quadcopters that follow you around (Intel), launch from theback of trucks (Ford and DJI) and fly like planes (Parrot) have already been unveiled this week at CESin Las Vegas.

But what if drones could carry people, too?

That apparently simple question seems to have been answered, at least hypothetically, by the Chinese drone maker Ehang which has unveiled what it claims is the world's first autonomous helicopter drone.

The Ehang 184 is a 440-pound, eight-rotor aircraft which the company claims is able to lift a single person 500 metres into the air and fly them to any point on Google Maps, avoiding objects automatically and safely handling take-off and landing (as long as it can be reached within the 23 minutes battery limit). Ehang adds that in the event of your drone experiencing problems, human pilots housed in custom built "command centres" will be able to take over and guide you to safety. Of course, it would have to build such centres first.

Supposedly costing between £130,000 and £200,000 -- a price tag which includes air conditioning and in-flight WiFi -- Ehang 184 has caused at stir at CES, even though the aircraft has remained static on the show floor and not (yet?) soared into the show air with a human passenger inside.

Ehang's press site for the 184 craft goes into fairly exacting detail about the drone and the experience of flying one, going so far as to list the size of bag you can carry (16 inches) and the colour of the reading light ('custom made'). Of course much is unknown about the Ehang 184, too -- not least how such a craft hopes to gain certification by international flight authorities in China, first, and then the US, New Zealand and Europe where Ehang plans to launch subsequently. The 184 would be impossible to fly legally in the UK under current regulations, and would need years of testing to get anywhere near a public rollout.

Many are suspicious that Ehang's plan is much further from completion than the three-to-four months predicted by CFO Shang Hsiao in an interview with WIRED US, or if the idea is mainly promotion for the company's more straightforward, and apparently fairly average, consumer drone

Ehang is not the only company working on human-carrying autonomous vehicles, however, with the US Navy and Near Earth Autonomy among those interested in the concept. Amazon is working hard to push regulators to think more creatively about how to build infrastructure for drones. Google is also attempting to develop new communications standards to form the backbone of the system. Someone will eventually build a working human-carrying drone, even if it proves Ehang are slightly more confident about the 184, in January 2016, than they should be.

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