Great idea for an app

[Masaniello]

I had this great idea for an app and I hope it hasn't been taken already. I don't know if it is technologically feasible but I think Apple, Samsung and the others should give it a go. Once installed, the app will help with phone user safety. If the user is staring at their phone and not noticing the six lane highway they're about to cross without looking or the person carrying hot drinks they're about to run into, the app will scream at the user 'LOOK WHERE YOU'RE GOING!'. This app will save lives.

 

[jsilver256]

I like that idea. However it would not be an app. That would be an OS-level integration which requires the camera to actively run at all times.

To imagine the difficulty of this problem - pretend you're a computer and you are sitting in a dark room. You are getting 15 or so camera frames a second. From these 15 frames, construct a model of the world and people around you and tell the user that they're walking into danger.

I don't think standard GPS tech / Kalman Filters will work here, as there isn't a constraint on where pedestrians can go (unlike e.g. driving apps where the GPS assumes you are always on a road and always going forward).

That pretty much leaves cameras as the only sensor... like Tesla. And to be honest it'd be very tough to do this efficiently on mobile hardware. You'd have to do depth reconstruction to really track all the objects / humans moving around you in real time and that's not exactly fun to do without depth cameras / LIDAR. I think it's possible, but would require years of specialized CV development and gonna necessarily burn a lot of battery.

I think this is perhaps more suited to headsets like the Apple Vision Pro - where you could argue it's almost a necessity. These also contain SLAM/VIO which track relative motion and will do a much better job of detecting when you're walking to disaster.

 

[Masaniello]

Alternatively, people could actually look where they're going but given the level of technological addiction, that might be too much to ask.

 

[jsilver256]

If the premise of this thread was sarcasm or a joke, then I failed to detect it. Or succeeded at being autistic. Either way....

 

[Jumpinbare]

 

[FilterFreq]

You know what's crazy? Even if this started out as a joke, I think this type of thing will become common once we get a handle on AI a little better. Once we can accurately detect common human experiences, I think apps like this will genuinely become a reality. I'm not sure how many sensors and how much computer vision we'll need (not to mention processor power), but I guarantee it'll exist within the next 10 years.

Will people just turn it off when it nags them? Well, yeah. That's the real problem

 

[Masaniello]

You have the pedestrian looking at their phone while crossing the road and the oncoming driver looking at their phone. Disaster in the making.

 

[Cryptid]

I had this great idea for an app and I hope it hasn't been taken already. I don't know if it is technologically feasible but I think Apple, Samsung and the others should give it a go. Once installed, the app will help with phone user safety. If the user is staring at their phone and not noticing the six lane highway they're about to cross without looking or the person carrying hot drinks they're about to run into, the app will scream at the user 'LOOK WHERE YOU'RE GOING!'. This app will save lives.

How about instead an app -- or, better yet, a feature -- that rolls over all calls to voicemail and delays receipt of all texts whenever the vehicle is in motion above 5 mph (8 kph), and does not restore these functions until the vehicle has been stopped for more than 3 minutes. This should not disable features that allow navigation or that prevent video recording (as a Go-Pro, for instance.