Helpmet- MIT Media Lab Mobility++ Hackathon Second Prize

Youga Chang
宅宅女子
Published in
3 min readDec 1, 2017

Team : IUI

Chang, Yu-Chia Lin, Chien-Yun Lee, Chia-Cheng Chang, Chih-Ya Chang

Helpmet– an AR helmet shows the forbidden zone alert to bring a safer driving environment

Problem:

A. Can not notice the cars beside the bus B. Can not notice the cars behind the scooter riders

Based on Taiwan Data, most car accidents of big cars happened when they change their lane.The reason why those car accidents happened is that there are some blind spots which scooter riders cannot notice.

How Might We?

How can we create a device that can notify scooter rider if lanes they want to change is safe or not, in order to make a safer environment on road.

Brainstorming

Process of brainstorming : https://realtimeboard.com/app/board/o9J_k0Z-c_Y=/

In order to solve this problem, we try to mark the forbidden zone to inform riders do not change the lane. However, how to detect the cars and how to display is our primary challenges. After a serious of brainstorming, we came up with the following solution.

Function of Helpmet

The function of helmet

First, we set the ultrasonic sensor on the beside and back of bus in oder to detect cars beside the bus and cars behind the bus. Then, this data will upload to cloud to calculate the forbidden zone. Last, the forbidden zone will display on the screen of helpmet to remind the scooter riders.

BUS

Screen of helpmet

Physical Prototype

Physical Prototype

We use Arduino and ultrasonic sensor to simulate the situation and the function of Helpmet.

View of scooter riders

Virtual Reality Prototype

We also build a interactive VR game to simulate and compare with the real situation with/ without the Helpment.

In our VR demo, we create four scenarios to experience the functions of helpmet. In addition, users can control the scooters by moving their heads.

  • Left / Right : control the direction of helpmet
  • UP: speed up
  • Down : brake

source code on GitHub :

https://github.com/johnson0903/Helpmet-scenario-demo

Demo Video: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1efnIDbYSCAxsHWYoViP8bthbOBaKvhKN

Situation 1 : Cars behind the riders
Situation 2: Cars beside the riders

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Youga Chang
宅宅女子

Product Designer based in Tokyo 🇯🇵 | I work hard to pet a Shiba Inu. 🐕