News - Blaupunkt hopes to reinvent satnav with real-time video navigation

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Blaupunkt's innovative TravelPilot satnavs will superimpose directions onto live footage of real-world images.

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Electric can-openers, guarding robots, and now idiot-proof GPS. One day, technology will bite man in the ass when women realise there's no use for the other sex anymore...

I have a very bad feeing about this. My worry is that if you overlay directions with the view from a camera, then people will start driving while looking at the GPS screen instead of the road. They will probably think they are safe doing so, because the GPS relays a live view, but they will loose their peripheral vision, so they will not see hazards that normal drivers would. It would not even help much to make the overlay feature speed sensitive, as one of the most risky times for accidents, but also for looking at a GPS and being distracted is when drivers are turning out of junctions at low speed.

If I where in the government agency responsible for type approval of devices like this, then I would be looking for reasons to deny approval for this device, as I think it will encourage dangerous behavior. Sadly, I don't think handheld GPS receivers are subject to type approval, so there is probably no mechanism to prevent this product from going on sale.

Instead I think manufactures should concentrate much more on improving the quality of voice guidance. Suppose you are driving, and you have with you a passenger who knows the area, or is a good map reader. Their voice directions are sufficient to guide you. They don't have to show you the map, or diagrams of junctions. The information they give is sufficiently context sensitive, that you don't need anything else.

A sat-nav made by Blaupunkt ! I hope it comes with a free map book.

I entirely agree with chrestomanci. About 95% of my satnav use is voice guidance, and the rest is the occasional quick glimpse at the screen to get an instant visual take on the layout of junctions. I positively don't want it overlaid over video, because a clear, simple and brightly-coloured diagram is, in my view, FAR more useful. I don't want a bucketload of irrelevant, extraneous and visually confusing data to process - I want to glimpse at the screen for about half a second and get all the info I actually need.

This idea strikes me as a classic example of a product seeking to solve a non-existent problem and going several steps backwards in the process. Like chrestomanci, I feel it deserves a ban, because it seems to me to be far more dangerous than people using a mobile phone while driving.