You’re driving past a fast food chain or roadsign, and suddenly an electronic image of a coupon appears in the corner of your windscreen advertising “$2.00 off any Burger Meal”.
Intel is showing off VLC, or Visible Light Communication, which could allow roadsigns to transmit burger coupons that appear on your car windscreen.
Though still in development, a demo showing the concept is being run by Intel at the CES show in Las Vegas. Intel is calling it Visible Light Communications (and yes, there’s an IEEE spec in the works), the concept is to use a light signal which is picked up by LEDs on your car to deliver data.
In theory, you could be passing a transmitting roadsign and up will pop an advertisement. You would use the coupon through a connected 3G wireless device such as a phone or notebook.
The demo we saw today showed the ability to display not one, but at least three or four of these coupons on the windscreen. They appeared along the top of the windscreen, starting the left hand corner, and yes, they were distracting.
We can see a stack of potential problems with this idea – not least the danger of looking at burger coupons when you should be watching the road.
Intel points out this is not just for coupons. The system could receive weather or traffic data from traffic lights, or emergency information. Emergency vehicles could use it tell traffic lights to close roads (the system is bidrectional).
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| Something tells me I'm hungry. Oh wait, it's those ads |
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| The technology needs line of sight to work |
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| Close up showing burger coupon . . only a concept, but one of the ideas Intel has on show |
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| The light transmitter - attached to a board for the Intel demo |
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| LEDS on the "car" - or in this case, a mockup of a car |