Britain's Heathrow airport has already made plans to step its game up once this year with a swank new parking garage, but the latest development most certainly outshines the prior. Reportedly, a network of 18 four-seater pods will be unveiled within two years after Terminal 5 opens next March in order to shuttle passengers "to and from a business car park to the new terminal building." Hailed as the UK's "first personal rapid transport system (PRT)," this energy-efficient, battery powered system will enable the driverless pods to be summoned on demand by individual families and taken to a variety of nearby locations. Creators claim that users will be thrilled by having their own taxi of sorts without having to ride alongside strangers, but not surprisingly, each pod will indeed support CCTV surveillance. Hey, it's Big Brother or John Doe -- pick your poison.

Finally, someone has had the kindness to step in and solve the age-old problem of finding your car at the airport. Britain's Heathrow -- a major hub for scores of European airlines and their travelers -- is about to unleash a new wing known as Terminal 5, and as part of the package, its parking lot is getting an upgrade. A new automated system in the garage will snap a photo of your license plate as you head in, direct you to a space using illuminated arrows and an infrared camera tracking system, then issue a ticket which can be read at a kiosk when you get back. When you insert the stub into the reader, a digital display shows you a 3D map of the carpark, and points you to the exact location of your vehicle. According to planners, the project will reduce traffic, cut carbon emissions by 397 tons per year, and will halve the number of relationship-ending arguments that occur while trying to find a car.

[Thanks, Rastrus]

For every vocal privacy advocate, there are probably one hundred people who would just like to get through the lines a bit quicker at the airport, and perhaps cut down on that 3 hour pre-flight arrival time -- as long as it didn't mean compromising national security in the process. To that end, the UK's Heathrow airport is implementing an opt-in biometrics system called miSense that allows passengers to bypass lines and breeze through the check-in process if they agree to selling their souls forking over some private data do the BAA. Beyond your fingerprint data, you'll need to have held a valid passport for over six months and be subjected to some UK government background checks, but after that you'll get your fingerprints tied to your passport and be able to bypass lines at the airport with a simple swipe of the finger -- and eventually face and eye biometric scans as well. Seems to be a pretty good trade-off to us, and we like how the program is optional right now, we just hope that with UK's predilection for big brother activity, this won't become a mandatory program and get all biometric on the more paranoid privacy types who would rather not fork over such data.

[Via Fark]