The dangers of cell phone use while driving is a serious question, but only the iceberg’s tip in a mobile information age when drivers have access to an array of entertainment and information technologies.
A new aspect of designing products intended for use by drivers now involves assessing safety implications. Motorola Labs recently built an automobile simulator to further safety research and has held an industry seminar intended to devise an agenda of what’s needed to assure that new auto-centric technology enhances safety rather than jeopardizes it.
The lab includes a car placed amid audio and video equipment that immerse the driver in the sounds, sights and feel of actually driving. Video cameras and sensors tied to five computers collect a wealth of information on the driver as he drives and does other things like talk on the phone or use a navigation tool.
“We collect 130 measurements on the entire performance of the driver,” said Mike Gardner, director of Motorola’s intelligent systems lab. “We can tell where their eyes are as they drive, their foot position, hands on the steering wheel and on and on.”
The University of Iowa has a far more elaborate simulator than Motorola’s, and so does Ford Motor Co., but those are intended to aid people who are designing and building vehicles, said Gardner. Motorola’s simulator and those being built by other companies that supply electronic products intended for use in autos are sufficient for their purpose.
Some of Motorola’s research is aimed at precompetitive issues such as setting standards for things like speech interfaces with automobile systems, Gardner said, and other research is focused on developing proprietary technology Motorola hopes to market. The main purpose of some proposed products is to enhance safety. A device that warns the driver when he crosses the centerline of the road is an example of such a product.
“We can use smoke and mirrors to give someone in the simulator the look and feel of products that don’t exist now,” Gardner said.
Many policymakers, including some on the Chicago City Council, may feel instinctively that using a cell phone while driving degrades safety, yet there isn’t yet enough solid information to provide a definitive answer, the Motorola researchers said.
“It’s premature to pass legislation, and there could be unintended consequences from legislation,” said Chuck Eger, director of Motorola’s driver safety office. “It’s part of the education process to demonstrate that a gut reaction to safety issues may not be quite correct.”
Virtual galaxy: Using a high-speed data connection, programmers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications on the University of Illinois campus in Urbana were able to help construct a planetarium program without ever traveling to New York City where the program is being shown.
The Illinois programmers worked in a virtual reality environment called the CAVE, for cave automatic virtual environment, and as they constructed data images, the images were shown at the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium in New York. That enabled collaborators in Illinois and New York to make changes and try different choreography to the computer-generated images.
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“We’ve been involved in remote collaborative efforts before, but certainly nothing at this level,” said Robert Patterson, an Illinois visualization programmer. “This is an example of connecting two sites with two unique display systems to put together visualization sequences in real time over long distances. We never once needed to travel to the museum.”
The connection was supplied by the Internet2’s Abilene research network that enables researchers to experiment with super broadband links. The show, “The Search for Life,” which looks at the possibility of life outside our solar system, opened last week in New York.
Falcon power: The Midwestern population of peregrine falcons has made a comeback in part by nesting in boxes placed far above the ground on smokestacks at electric utility plants.
Power plant peregrines account for more than one-third of the Midwest’s population and more than half in Wisconsin and Minnesota. But some of the birds’ hosts at power plants have been uneasy with the relationship, fearing the close proximity to stack emissions might harm the falcons.
Now a study sponsored by the Electric Power Research Institute has put those fears to rest: Blood levels of metals such as mercury, selenium and nickel aren’t significantly different in power plant residents than in their cousins living at the Iowa-based Raptor Resource Project, an organization dedicated to increasing falcon populations.
“We tested birds from five different locations over a three-year period,” said Bob Anderson, executive director of the raptor group. “We were assured by the results that the peregrines were healthy even though they were living so close to large industrial facilities.
“Incidentally, power plant nesting falcons are the most successful in terms of the number of young fledged,” Anderson said. “More utility falcon chicks successfully leave the nest than do falcons hatched on buildings, cliffs and bridges.”