dk1z#@andrew.cmu.edu.UUCP (02/21/87)
I've ridden motorcycles for quite a few years, much of that out of town, either just wandering around or actually trying to get somewhere 600 miles away. I've used tank bags to hold my maps, but all in all, they are not ideal. It's hard to get enough of the map visible, the maps tend to die young due to a lot of refolding, I never have all of the maps I need, and I have to take my eyes well off of the road for a considerable interval if I want to check out the map and keep rolling. So, what would be ideal is a heads up display for the map. (We will leave out guages and the like for a moment.) Unfortunately, the only place I've seen anything quite like what I want is in a movie called Time Rider. Not too easy to get ahold of, even if it were real. Has anyone developed anything like this, however experimental? It seems to me that with a CD player with the maps on it, an interface between the CD and the HUD, and a HUD for the helmet, you could do this. Digitizing a map and getting it onto a CD must have already been done and the interface/controller to scroll through the map should not be too tough. But I know very little about HUDs. How do they work? How much would one cost? Could you put one into a motorcycle helmet (leaving most of the electronics on the bike? Would it be legal? (Obscuring vision, or something like that.) So, any pointers to existing gear for this, CD maps (with associated hardware), HUDs, literature, et all would be most appreciative. I'm probably dreaming, but it'd be interesting to look into. -David Kovar
ron@brl-sem.UUCP (02/24/87)
I suspect that the current heads up display technology is a bit rough for motorcycle application. The way they currnetly work is to have a box, about the size of a shoe box, with some display in it which is columnated and bounced off a semireflective surface in front of the viewer. This sounds a bit clunky for a helmet mount. As for storage, the only consumer system that I've seen is ETAK. ETAK uses a CRT for a display and stores map info on (gak) cassette. I noticed that National Car Rental at SFO had these available in their cars. -Ron