I recently happened across a Kickstarter campaign for an interesting product called the “*HUDWAY Glass*”:https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/361842686/hudway-glass-keeps-your-eyes-on-the-road-while-dri: a car mount for iPhones and Android mobile devices which includes a special glass for use as a heads-up display (HUD). The Kickstarter has already been fully backed (as of this writing, well over 2x their original goal), so the HUDWAY Glass should get produced and sold for $49, which is a very fair price. They’ve already had an app on market for over a year called “*HUDWAY*”:http://hudwayapp.com/ (hence the name of the HUDWAY Glass mount itself), so I decided to give it a test drive (quite literally) over the past couple weeks.
HUDs are very helpful for keeping your eyes on the road as you only need to refocus your eyes within your normal windshield view, keeping your view of the road and any obstacles still in the background. It’s surprising how far you can go at highway speeds in the second it takes you to look down at your speedometer and back up (95ft at 65 MPH). There’s a reason that fighter jets tend to use HUDs! The HUDWAY app itself can be used in either a normal dash mount, or in HUD mode with the image flipped vertically do it’s legible in the reflection of your windshield (or a product like the coming HUDWAY Glass). It shows speed, a road direction preview, navigation directions and some other minor niceties that are better for serious driving or racing (one of the founders has rally racing as a hobby). Showing the basics on your windshield helps clarify speed & upcoming turns, reduce distraction, and can also help in the dark or inclement weather–we certainly see enough of that in Vermont!–by showing you what the upcoming twists and turns in the road are like (including highlighting sharp turns).
HUDWAY uses your device’s GPS to determine speed and supports getting routes & directions from Apple Maps, Google Maps, or Open Street Map, so there are quite a few options there. I find the directions to be well timed and accurate. In areas with more complex roadways, it’d probably be helpful if it gave you more information about which lane to use, but I’m not sure if that’s a limitation of HUDWAY or of its various sources of navigation directions. The one downside I do see is that the HUDWAY app itself requires you to specify a route between two destinations. That works fine for my commute, but for general errands, it’s a bit of a pain to configure. They have a separate Speedometer app coming out in November which will be more useful for that type of use, which I am looking forward to.
When Vermont started banning handheld devices for drivers (I could never, and was not interested, in texting and driving anyway), I installed an aftermarket stereo with hands-free Bluetooth support that works very well with my iPhone 5 & Siri for calls and controlling audio playback. Since I have a nearly 100 mile round-trip commute up hill and down dale to our headquarters in the Mad River Valley, I tend to queue up my favorite podcasts and just drive. My phone sits there charging all the time, so having it running HUDWAY on my dash puts it to good use. Plus, that means there’s even less temptation for me to pick it up. I use a waterproof “*LifeProof fre*”:http://www.smalldog.com/search?search=lifeproof+fre+case case on my iPhone 5 (which has been great) and that tends to add quite a bit of glare, so it’s not really visible in daylight at all, but it works wonders at night. Fortunately, this time of year I’m driving home in the dark, so it’s still useful. That said, the daylight usage is the problem that HUDWAY set out to resolve with the HUDWAY Glass. Plus it keeps it secured to your dash to it doesn’t slide during cornering or braking, so I’m planning to pre-order one.
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There are a couple of minor downsides that I have run into. First, and this could be that my older iPhone 5 does have as accurate an accelerometer & GPS, the speedometer does not appear to be as accurate at highway speeds (fortunately, it only seems to over-estimate my speed by a few MPH). Second, you really need to have your device’s brightness turned all the way up, so it really draws down the power if you’re not charging it. The power draw isn’t much of a problem since I use a 17W “*Hammerhead USB Auto Charger*”:https://www.hammerheadcase.com/product/72/2-port-auto-charger, but it does mean I can no longer get a full charge if it’s running low before I start my commute. On the few occasions I’ve forgotten my phone on the dash and left it running, I’ve come back to a completely dead phone. Oops. I wouldn’t advise leaving your iPhone on your dash anyway, as I’ve seen far too many break-ins.
For me, with a long commute through varied terrain and weather and a good hands-free stereo, it really modernizes my older commuter car and puts my phone to good use. I hope to pick up the HUDWAY Speedometer app when it’s released next month. I think we’re going to see an increasing number of hardware solutions that are currently integrated into vehicles as expensive options (navigation, HUDs, etc.) moving out to our phones and the HUDWAY Glass looks like it’ll help that transition nicely and hopefully keep drivers–and me!–safer.
