CES 2020 is about to end, but a few interesting details still stand out from the event, including this one: an Android Auto-based system that uses pedestrian phones (plus a little predictive AI) for you. warn when someone is about to jump in front of your car. As always with this kind of early tech demos, there is a parcel of catches.
The system is called Viziblezone (a name it shares with the company itself), and it requires the in-car navigation system and pedestrian phones to run the company’s app. There is a little a bit of flexibility there, as the company plans to provide an SDK that can plug into third-party products, and it can be integrated directly into in-car systems (or even just run an app in a connected phone) . But essentially, for this to work as expected, every car would have to be plugged into Viziblezone in some way, and every pedestrian phone too either need to have the app preinstalled and running, or third-party apps should use its SDK to the point of being ubiquitous.
Still, if all of those hypothetical stars can line up, Viziblezone-enabled phones can broadcast their location to nearby vehicles, which process that data with a bit of machine learning to determine if there’s a good chance of an accident. or not. If there is, drivers are alerted with enough time to (hopefully) prevent rushing into reckless pedestrians.
The number of dependencies of a system like this means that you are unlikely to see it in your phone or car very soon, unless someone like Google decides to integrate or clone it. . Even when everything is working fine, and if somehow every pedestrian agrees to install the app, there is potential for privacy issues, depending on how location data is transmitted. Existing camera-based solutions available in some cars may not work as quickly or warn you as much, but they are also not based on tracking phones of random pedestrians.
Although the company released an app to the Play Store, we couldn’t see it available in Android Auto during our own testing. For more details on how it works, you can visit the Viziblezone website.
Source: Visible area
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