Yes. The Road Cam Car Video Recorder Gadget is essentially an economical mini-digital camcorder; designed to be mounted on a car dashboard and enables you to capture video or images of road situations. This is useful for insurance purposes or even law enforcement.
Or even just for fun. Turn the camera to inside of a car/taxi to record a suspected passenger, good for unsafe taxi passenger recording, or to record a taxi robbery.
This useful gadget has a built in red laser pointer for aiming the camera’s line of sight. You can download your videos by connecting to PC via USB — plug and play under Windows XP Records video on SD card (not supplied) up to 2GB. Using the provided AV cable you can connect the camera to a car monitor such as a Car DVD Player and view the video capture live. [1]
“Intelligent” cars fitted with black boxes that can send video footage and information about driving behavior during accidents to the police and insurance companies are being developed by Intel.
The boxes will record information about the vehicle speed, steering and braking along with video footage from inside and outside the vehicle. The information will be sent to police and insurance companies in the event of an accident to make it easier to determine the cause of car crashes and identify the person responsible.
The device forms part of an intelligent car envisaged by researchers at Intel. They want to transform cars into smart vehicles that are able to detect dangers on the road and even take over control from motorists.
Intel has been in discussion with car manufacturers about developing cars that are permanently connected to the Internet and other vehicles using wireless technology. Camera systems that can recognize street signs and then take over control of a car if the motorist tries to drive the wrong way up a one-way street are being developed for use in vehicles. On board sensors will also be able to detect potholes in the road and report their location to road maintenance authorities, as the car is moving.
These smart-cars of the near future will also be able to track the location of surrounding vehicles and alert drivers if they get too close or try to change lanes when another vehicle is in their blind spot.
Motorists will even be able to use their mobile phone or computer to lock and unlock their car remotely, turn on the alarm and even start the engine to warm it up.
“The intelligent vehicle is what we are talking about here,” said Justin Ratner, director of Intel Labs and chief technology officer. “Once a car is connected, more or less on a continuous basis, all sorts of interesting possibilities present themselves. With vision systems on cars, it is perfectly reasonable for a car on its own to see the sign that says “wrong way’ or ‘do not enter’ and bring the vehicle to a halt at the side of the road so we don’t have these senseless accidents where someone has failed to recognize a sign. We have talked to highway maintenance departments about using sensors that are already in cars to report the GPS coordinates for pot holes in the road to the maintenance department.” [2]
Endnotes
[1] http://ajoka.com/road_cam.htm.
[2] Gray, Richard. “Intelligent cars will report accidents to authorities.” 7.03.2010. www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/news/7870387/Intelligent-cars-will-rep ort-accidents-to-authorities.html.