Free Idea to Solve the Texting While Walking Conundrum

I was having lunch with some friends this week when the topic of the dangers of walking while texting came up. In case you're unaware of this important public safety issue, there have been a number of incidents of people colliding with things on the sidewalk while texting on their cellphones.

This has prompted the powers that be in London to wrap lamp posts and other sidewalk obstacles in marshmallow cushions, and the American College of Emergency Physicians to issue an alert about the dangers of texting while walking (and of course driving).

It's all fine and well to say, "um, just don't do it, dummy," but we all know we're going to. It's an occupational hazard.

But I'm particularly concerned, since iPhone sales are going through the roof, about all of my friends with their first iPhone. They're all so engrossed in playing with the shiny slick interface, that they haven't thought the dangers of this activity through.

Anyway, I like the idea of wrapping street objects in fluffy marshmallows. I think it'll make cities feel a lot more... soft and friendly. But the more pressing issue for me is what to do about fast-moving objects. I mean, should you be walking through an area of frequently falling objects (e.g. pianos, 500 lb weights, sticks of ACME dynamite, etc.), you can't really rely on those objects being padded. Even if they were, a padded piano dropping from 50 feet above street level is still a piano dropping from 50 feet. It won't be pretty.

So that's where my idea for a little technological assistance comes in.



Basically, it consists of a simple add-on device and an app. The add-on device is a little holder for a convex mirror that allows the phone's camera to survey a wide swath of street and identify potential dangers. The software app would calculate vectors of objects and identify when those objects were likely to intersect with the person's path.


When a danger is identified, the camera takes over whatever application the user (cough idiot) is using and displays the realtime footage of the street, plus a very large warning, telling the user what course of evasive action to take. I had considered putting an "ignore" button in there as well, so that the user could choose to ignore the message, but if you think it through, it's really not required :-). Actually, on second thought, I think there should be one in there, but instead of ignore it should look like this: