A Car Navigation System That Takes Pictures

Brandon Miniman writes "Navman has brought to market the first in-car navigation system with a built in camera, the iCN 750. The camera lets you take pictures of places you've been. Geographical coordinates are then assigned to each picture, so that you can bring up a gallery, and choose your destination by clicking on a picture." Add to this an always-on, all-sides video camera to document that it was the minivan that strayed into your lane, and it'll be even better.

Re:a topic also for YRO?

[john82]

What about your insurance company?

I would think the major insurers would love to have an "always on" camera to monitor outside activity and inside activity. It would make such a nice complement to the acceleration, speed, distance and braking data they can get from your car's on-board computer.

Customer: This other car came out of nowhere and ran me off the road!
Insurer: Well we don't find any evidence of another vehicle, Sir, but according to the on-board video surveill... er, protection system, you were drinking a beer and having an animated conversation on your cell phone when you went off the road.

Insurance discount

[ewg]

Seriously, could you imagine the insurance discount you'd get if they knew every incidient would be photographed?

1 more camera needed

[dbc001]

Add to this an always-on, all-sides video camera to document that it was the minivan that strayed into your lane, and it'll be even better.

I want a camera pointing out the driver side window so I can record all the inapproproate behavior that cops exhibit. Like the Picture of Eyes [slashdot.org] from yesterday, a little red light on a camera would probably go a long way towards making cops do the right thing (and say the right thing too!).

If you're wondering how I can be so anti-police, I recently got assaulted because some nutcase thought that I cut in line in front of him (I didn't - in fact I offered to let him go ahead of me). When the cops arrived, I explained what happened and the cop's reply was "Well, if you fuck somebody, you're gonna get fucked". American police are incredibly unprofessional, rude, racist, sexist, and of course there's the occasional beating too - the more cameras we have pointing at them (not us!) the better off we'll be.

Could it Be?

[drooling-dog]

Could this finally be the gadget through which I find True Happiness?

All of the others have been disappointments in that regard...

You'll be amazed how useless the pictures are...

[dpbsmith]

...It's not that the camera won't have enough pixels. It's not that you need an Ansel Adams-quality photograph.

It's that to get a nice, clear, useful, _recognizable_ thumbnail-sized picture of your destination requires a lot of intelligent thought, good framing of the picture, thirty seconds to walk around and pick a good angle, and a time of day when the light is reasonable.

Three-quarters of the pictures people take with this thing will be

a) unrecognizable due to reflections on the car window they're trying to shoot through, or

b) unrecognizable because of lighting issues (dark, muddy, illegible storefront against a nice bright sky), or

c) unrecognizable because the camera was pointed at the wrong thing, or

d) unrecognizable because a lot of buildings look pretty much like each other, or

e) unrecognizable because the store name is too small to read in the finished picture when displayed thumbnail size on the navigation screen, or

f) unrecognizable because important recognition features were hidden behind a parked car, or

g) unrecognizable because you don't have a view of the front of the building from the only place where you could stop the car, which happens to be the parking lot in back of the building, or

h) unrecognizable because it's night-time and the camera isn't sensitive enough to make a good picture by streetlight (and the streetlighting isn't even enough even if it were, and the flash isn't bright enough to light up a building thirty feet away, and even if it were all you'd get are the flash reflections off the windows...

Re:You'll be amazed how useless the pictures are..

[Control Group]

Yes, yes, and again, yes.

It turns out that taking quality pictures - and I don't even mean "hang them in an art gallery" quality, just "easily recognizable and/or pleasant to look at" - is a non-trivial task. Trying to do it with an inferior device (mostly due to crappy lenses) only makes the job harder. Trying to do it quickly or, worse, while moving is yet another difficulty.

Add to all the technical difficulties you've already covered the fact that most people only have the vaguest notion how to effectively frame a shot, and this gadget only gets more useless.

(Note that when I say "useless," I don't mean "incapable of being used," I mean "making it easy for the user to perform uselessly")

Check out Fugawi

[Mister Transistor]

There's a PC/Win prog called "Fugawi Global Navigator" that can associate images and/or sounds with waypoints or GPS fixes. I know it interfaces with PDA/Smartphones too, so it may use them as a camera for input instead of just using a regular pre-existing image or sound file.

Some cool features; it can use nearly any map source, standard USGS maps, NOAA marine charts, GeoTIFF's and aerial/satellite imagery. It has 3-D elevation views and GPS driving assist.

No, I don't work for them :)

I'm not as sure, but I think the latest offerings from DeLorme may finally have the photo association feature too.