It's practically a foregone conclusion that eying your handy GPS unit a bit too much whilst cruising down the freeway can indeed put you and your fellow motorists
in peril, and while robotic turn-by-turn voiceovers do quell the staring fits somewhat, we still tend to rely a tad too much on sheer visuals. GlobalTop is hoping to make the roads a safer place to navigate with its forthcoming GPS
HUD Speed Meter, which will supposedly makes its debut at CeBIT. This
Bluetooth-enabled device purportedly "displays your speed and other navigational info, like direction, onto your car's windshield," and also enables handsfree communications with your BT-equipped cellphone. Moreover, the speed meter can be setup to alert the driver when exceeding a user-set limit, and while you may not be familiar with the brand, it's reportedly a spinoff of
f-tech, which bodes fairly well for us actually seeing this thing beyond the Photoshop stage. As expected, there's no pricing or availability deets surfacing just yet, but all that should change come next month.
[Via
NaviGadget]
Back in the wild, cost-be-damned heyday of 2006, the US military was flying high with its "Land Warrior" technology, a multi-part combat system combining wearable GPS sat-nav, weapon-mounted sensors, and a full color heads-up display (viewed via a sinister looking monocle). But like all good military spending parties, this one came to a close just a few months after it was announced with an order to cut $3.3 billion in funding for the Future Combat Systems initiative. Now, however, it seems that the Senate Armed Services Committee has opted to partially reinstate the program (likely to the chagrin of some soldiers, for whom the gear adds 15 lbs of extra load), allowing two additional battalions to be equipped (joining the single battalion currently using the technology), and spending another $30 million on development and improvement. Now, if only the army would reinstate that Skynet program.
