• 4iiii Heads-Up Display For Athletes Indicates Metrics With LEDs

    Devin Coldewey

    Devin Coldewey is a Seattle-based writer and photographer. He has written for the TechCrunch network since 2007. Some posts he’d like you to read: The Dangers of Externalizing Knowledge | Generation i | Surveillant Society | Choose Two | Frame Wars | The User’s Manifesto | Our Great Sin His personal website is coldewey.cc. → Learn More

    Thursday, October 7th, 2010


    This is a good idea. We’ve all seen bike computers, heart-rate monitors, and so on, the sort of things athletes or just data-loving runners and cyclists track during their activities. The trouble is that they’re rarely easy to consult: you have to take your eyes off the road to check your speed, or interrupt your run cadence to check your heart rate.

    The 4iiii Sport-iiii system (pronounced sport eyes, apparently) solves this problem by suspending a little bar in your peripheral vision and indicating key metrics with LEDs.

    So you program it ahead of time to tap into your various monitoring devices — speedometer, heart rate monitor, watch — and it displays that information to you not as actual numbers, but in a simplified way. I’m not sure exactly how each one would work, but you can imagine if your target heart rate is 100, the amber lights would light as your approach it, green turn on when you’re hitting it, and perhaps blink fast if you exceed it. The only controls are a tap or double tap, prompting an update or changing data type respectively.

    Sure, in a few years we’ll all have transparent AMOLED displays in our sunglasses, but until then this is a cool little system, if you can get used to the non-standard readout.

    [via Pink Bike]

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