A full list of the ideas currently in the IdeaLab

Lately, I’ve been cycling down to the beach. It’s roughly five miles there, so my total ride is ten miles each time. One thing that struck me, about every time, was invariably some cyclist would speed past me, and it was an impetus to work harder. Obviously, competition is strong in most sports.

So I believe I’ve seen some ideas around having virtual reality glasses for stationery bikes. And a fairly popular iPhone application RunKeeper has a mode which gives you a pace for an invisible competitor. So the idea of using competition is certainly not new, but how effective is it to hear that the person you’re virtually running against, is 5 seconds ahead of you?

Most serious cyclists seem to wear sunglasses. How about VR glasses, that could show you a digital rendering of the road ahead while you ride, and insert a virtual competitor into the rendering. When you begin your ride, you could identify what you’d like your pace to be, and set certain parameters for how the competitor would react, and also insert some randomness to the whole event.

The sunglasses would be outfitted with a camera in front, to feed back into the glasses. And you’d connect the whole rig up to a smartphone (iPhone/Android), which seem to have enough power these days to perform the actions necessary. Plug this into any of the Fit / Running / whatever web apps out there, and make it social.

The biggest hurdle, is safety. How can you ensure that you are always accurately seeing what is ahead? If the software fails for any reason at all, a crash could be imminent.

It would be really neat, if there was a way to ensure transparency in the sunglasses while showing a graphical overlay on certain portions of the glasses. Then that hurdle, is erased.

Food for thought.