A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one.

Henry Ford

Cambrian House began as a crowdsourcing community using a wisdom of crowds based approach to discover new business and technology ideas. These pages are being kept online as a technology demo to showcase Chaordix™.

Looking to harness the power of your crowd? Find out about Chaordix™ - technology that enables enterprises to get the most out of crowdsourcing.

Ideas

View next idea in this round »

Hands-Free Audio Adventures for Automobiles

Submitted by: briggzay
Created: Jun 1, 2007, 7:21 am

Join Cambrian House

People

Ideas

Businesses

Connect with talented people. Collaborate on ideas. Realize your vision.

Not freeish. Not freesque. It's free!

The Idea

A car stereo or pmp (personal media player) that allows a user, through their car audio system, to play audio adventure games hands-free.

For example, firing up the device would start the game, and through the audio system would boom some sort of opening scene to the game. It would then say something like "You have arrived at the gate. Do you want to A, enter, B, wimp out..". Saying "A" would play the next audio clip: "You have entered the gate, and see a huge courtyard.. (booming music and sound effects). To your left is a.."

Device Requirements:
* can process simple voice commands (might even be multiple choice - "a", "b", "c" etc)
* can process simple tree-based logic (i.e., play an audio track, then request a voice command, when the voice command is heard, play a new audio track)
* can play audio through the car's audio system - either through an FM transmitter, or directly
* can easily receive (via upload, cd, flash) new adventure

I thought of this idea when I was...

Driving, in 2000, from Ohio to Massachusetts. Having run out of music to listen to, i was dying to play some sort of immersive adventure game that would a) have good audio quality and b) be interactive enough to keep me awake

Comments Posted

cRitter Posted: August 22, 2007, 10:33 pm

seriously, eyes on the road is a metaphor. what they're really saying is "pay attention!"

ccozad Posted: August 23, 2007, 1:29 am

I like it! This would be great driving through "scenic" Nevada. I would love to help rig up a prototype. PM me.

MCaballes Posted: August 23, 2007, 4:51 am

kewl...the voice command sounds cool!

Rosary_Monday Posted: August 23, 2007, 5:09 am

Rawkin!

Go for it briggz

micco Posted: August 23, 2007, 7:38 am

From a technology standpoint, this would be fairly easy to implement on a computer platform. Reducing it to a more portable device might be more challenging, but given a PC-based prototype you should be able to get funding to move forward. I can easily see it running on a smart-phone platform with existing software capabilities.

Still, I think christopherritter has a point. I listen to a lot of audiobooks and podcasts in the car, but those are passive. Anything that required more active involvement, problem solving, etc. is likely to be very distracting. You will encounter that reaction a lot moving forward, so the first thing you construct should be a good logical response.

bcforrester Posted: August 23, 2007, 8:24 am

I swear everyday at slow moving, often swerving drivers using their cell phones behind the wheel. I cannot imagine what games would do to these drivers abilities. Perhaps you can make this product only available to people with IQ's over 120...

HerbCSO Posted: August 23, 2007, 10:13 pm

Oh yeah, WAY too distracting! No, no, no!

vdiaz Posted: August 24, 2007, 8:41 pm

I don't think playing the game would be any more distracting than a conversation with a passenger in the car. The device sounds interesting and a device with voice recognition capabilities could be used for more than just gaming...

GordonMcDowell Posted: August 27, 2007, 12:56 pm

micco, i actually love the idea... dangerous as it may be. i don't know quite what the capabilities of speech recognition (as available to .NET in Moto-Q or J2ME in most other devices) may be... but if the platform supports it i bet it would be a great way to play already written games!

Imagine riding with 3 friends and trying to solve Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (Infocom) on a trip to NASA.

Possible issues:
- Less assumptions could be made about what was being said. Device is no longer trying to decipher your speech to select a contact to dial. It may now have to recognize crazy words like "dangly bit" and "Zaphod Beeblebrox".
- Cross talk in car (if more than one passenger).
- Driving noise (if more than one passenger then mic won't always be right by someone's mouth).

Hummm... upon re-reading my comment I guess one could assume I prefer not to interact directly with fellow passengers.

PhilipH Posted: August 27, 2007, 6:48 pm

There's another idea doing the rounds you might want to look at - something about an adventure game that can be played with a mobile phone while up and about. Perhaps you can combine the ideas.

Brenden Posted: August 28, 2007, 10:57 pm

woot one more way to make people drive just that much worse

Hello!

Ideas