A couple years back, a research team made up of tech geniuses at MIT gave everyone a sneak peak at a project they hoped would revolutionize the driving experience.
AIDA, a highly intuitive navigation technology, can sense where a driver is headed and use that information to advise on how to get there quickly or inform the person of places nearby that may be of particular interest.
For the most part, the dash-mounted robot was cleverly conceived, except that it developed inferences about your preferred destinations and routes by probing and analyzing your facial expressions — which can kind of creep some people out. It also exhibited the typical herky-jerky robo-movements that can be pretty distracting when you’re trying to keep your eyes on the road. Since then, the researchers have scraped the device and replaced it with a system that turns the car’s dashboard into a real-time interactive 3-D driving map.
However, the concept behind the rebooted AIDA 2.0 can be viewed as either more intrusive or a really neat way to grab some nachos on the way home from work since the entire dashboard area — which includes the instrument panel, car radio and rear view mirrors — is transformed into a super-sized Garmin.
The system is controlled using hand gestures, and like the robot version, it uses onboard sensors to automatically learn an individual’s driving patterns all the while gathering information on local businesses, shopping districts, tourist and residential areas, as well as real-time road conditions like traffic jams. All this is done so that AIDA can tell drivers what they want to know when they need to know it.
Below are the demos of the earlier and newer versions of AIDA. Which do you prefer? Or would you rather stick to a less flashier standard GPS device?
AIDA Robot demo:
AIDA 2.0 demo:
Image: MIT
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First their bizarre (dash-mounted) backseat-driver robot complete with its own emotional face expressions, and now this. The cost to turn everything into a map must be enormous, but it's also pointless. This system knows where you're going, knows what businesses are around you, knows the traffic? So do existing GPSes! You can stick one of the newest Garmin GPSes on your dash and it will learn your driving patterns and guess where you want to go. In exchange for uploading your driving data, you get to download estimates from others' data about traffic at different times/days of the week to be incorporated into navigation. Real-time traffic updates can also be used for the areas that support it. The device also has data on millions of points of interest. So... what exactly does this turn-your-whole-dashboard-into-a-map boondoggle offer that a $200-$300 GPS doesn't? Oh yeah - the lack of an ability to put it in your pocket and take it with you. 
