Consider the following setup:
- EACH drivers wears a helmet.
- Helmets are equipped with an embedded system in-sync with all other helmets.
- The vehicle itself is in-sync with the driver's helmet.
- Through the helmet, a driver observes (and lives in) the virtual world, not the physical world around him. The virtual world is initialized once, then it reflect the immediate commands drivers give to their vehicles; such that, if Khaled's car and Waleed's car (in the virtual world) are running side by side at the same speed and Waleed -stupidly- gives a command to his steering wheel to run into Khaled's car, this will happen immediately in the virtual world, and both Waleed and Khaled will see (through their helmets) an accident.
- Vehicles respond to a driver's command (e.g. starting the engine, moving forward, pressing on brakes, turning left) 60 seconds after the driver issues the command. So, when Waleed turns his steering wheel running into Khaled's car, this happens immediately in the virtual world, but the car will respond physically to Waleed's command after 60 seconds, giving both Khaled and Waleed enough time to switch to another mode, cancelling Waleed's command which would have resulted in a physical accident.
Problems:
- We need the virtual world to accurately renders what will happen in 60 minutes. It needs to be aware of so many aspects in order to predict accurately what will happen in the physical world (e.g. conditions of electrical and mechanical systems in the vehicle, road conditions, pedestrians movement-the most impossible)
- We need all vehicles on the road to be equipped with the system, and all drivers on the road to use their helmets. The idea cannot be applied partially (by a subset of the vehicles).
- All vehicles on the road should be initialized at the same time while parking (not moving). This needs to happen only once.
Applicability:
Obviously, the idea is inapplicable on the road, as it stands now at least. However, the idea is applicable in any sceario where human operation of machines could result in catastrophic events, and physical interaction is done through machines only, not involving living things.
4 comments:
SA Waleed. How are you doing? We didn't meet since a long time, hope to see you soon isA.
About your idea, it's a nice one. But there's one major problem you didn't mention about this technique. At many times, the driver must take an immediate action on the road, for example to avoid running into someone passing the road, a big rocket or "balla3a". So, in such cases, waiting for 60 sec is too long (actually waiting for any period would be too long).
I think one way to reduce car accidents is to use railways for cars. Each railway (course) would be associated with a certain speed (30 KM/h, 60KM/h, 90KM/h, 120KM/h, etc). By having fixed speed for each course (instead of speed range), we can make sure that for any two cars in sequence, they will never collide. When the driver wants to change his speed level, he/she will issue a request to the railway controller, that will in turn calculate the right time for the driver's car to make the transtion, and will reply to the car to make the transition.
Problems:
+ A very expensive new road infrastructure is required.
+ That infrastructure would not be easily compatible with the current structure (in order to allow current cars to stay in work).
WA Faheem,
Thanks for your comment. I did mention the pedestrians as one of the problems, and also the road conditions (e.g. balla3a). If the system is fully aware of the surrounding environment, the driver will see such conditions in the virtual mode, and react to it in the virtual mode. After 60 seconds, when the car actually approaches the unfortunate condition (e.g. Balla3a), the buffered command of the driver will be executed.
One more problem about my proposal is that many accidents happen as a result of objects falling off trucks; it's almost impossible to make the virtual system predict the falling objects.
I like your proposal. Do you know of any R&D labs that experiment with such ideas?
waleed ammar
Oh, yeah, I can see now you listed that problem too, I'm sorry about my false alarm.
For your question: no, I don't know of any R&D labs that experiment with such ideas, although I'm sure there should be a lot of them.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8349923.stm
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