ePlaya

I believe it was in the helm of Disco Fish where I saw what looked like the old Tron video game. Turned out it was a realtime radar that displayed potentially hazardous objects in front of the vehicle using simple and bright geometries on their screen.

Despite the lo-fi graphics, it looked pretty advanced. I was curious if anyone saw this or maybe has a photo or insight into how common realtime radar HUDs are on art cars.

I had radar on my mutant vehicle. Conversation was more stimulating that it was but it was fun to look at and play with. It was an older furno unit with green rectangles on the screen marking reflecting objects. It would pick up so much reflected signal that one had to really tune it down to get any coherent picture of what was ahead.

Radar really needs metal to bounce off - so not sure how effective it would be.

motskyroonmatick wrote:I had radar on my mutant vehicle. Conversation was more stimulating that it was but it was fun to look at and play with. It was an older furno unit with green rectangles on the screen marking reflecting objects. It would pick up so much reflected signal that one had to really tune it down to get any coherent picture of what was ahead.

Cool. I looked through some of your posts but wasn't able to find a pic of your vehicle. I'm curious if you want to share.

I figured the radar was mostly to spot unlit bikes, but what kinds of other stuff would show up?

Is it useful to look at as you're driving on open playa beyond the headlights?

Any chance you have a photo of the screen?

Radar can detect people. Depends on the frequency and the receiver signal processing.

It is not a good idea to expose yourself, your passengers and people on the playa to the amount of energy that those systems put out. They could interfere with other playa communications on adjacent bands too.

I heard that at one point, the Discofish art car was self-driven. It may or may not be true, considering all the rumors that fly around...

...Googling around, it appears to be true. That's pretty crazy.

Thread drift, sorry!

Ano wrote:I heard that at one point, the Discofish art car was self-driven. It may or may not be true, considering all the rumors that fly around...

...Googling around, it appears to be true. That's pretty crazy.

Thread drift, sorry!

Drift away!!
I spent a couple hours on Discofish and never saw them self drive.
They had 3 monitors which were very cool to watch:
-Position, course & velocity on a map of the city - nicely done. I'm guessing GPS.
-Obstacle detection. It covered about 180 degrees forward facing and put a box with a descriptor around every return - probably radar.
-Main monitor above a keyboard with less interesting stuff to watch.

Damn, so it might not self-drive, but it does have one hell of a technological backbone to navigate safely.

I always imagined that the cockpit of some of the major vehicles HAD to be more exciting than a steering wheel and gas/brake pedals. Glad to know that my imagination is correct in at least one car...bus...fish!

I don't know about all that but while stuck just off pavement on entry Monday we kept getting distracted by, what can best be described as, this pinging noise. Turns out it was the "sonar" unit on some giganticass sub/tandem-bus/mv that was too long to be turned around and sent back with the rest of the traffic on pavement. Made it all the more surreal, hail, submarines, Camp Purgatory.... yup, another day at BM.

That bus. It annoyed me on playa one year.

I see The Nautilus around all the time, I have never once seen the doors opened or anyone getting on or off. Ever.

I got on and off of it once...about 5 years ago.

Ano wrote:Damn, so it might not self-drive, but it does have one hell of a technological backbone to navigate safely.

I always imagined that the cockpit of some of the major vehicles HAD to be more exciting than a steering wheel and gas/brake pedals. Glad to know that my imagination is correct in at least one car...bus...fish!

Discofish were my neighbors and I got a chance to ride & talk about the car. It's not radar but sonar. One of my friends that has a boat recognized the system right away. And it can drive itself, but they don't do that during the burn, for obvious reasons.

some seeing eye wrote:Radar can detect people. Depends on the frequency and the receiver signal processing.

It is not a good idea to expose yourself, your passengers and people on the playa to the amount of energy that those systems put out. They could interfere with other playa communications on adjacent bands too.

spacetime wrote:

motskyroonmatick wrote:I had radar on my mutant vehicle. Conversation was more stimulating that it was but it was fun to look at and play with. It was an older furno unit with green rectangles on the screen marking reflecting objects. It would pick up so much reflected signal that one had to really tune it down to get any coherent picture of what was ahead.

Cool. I looked through some of your posts but wasn't able to find a pic of your vehicle. I'm curious if you want to share.

I figured the radar was mostly to spot unlit bikes, but what kinds of other stuff would show up?

Is it useful to look at as you're driving on open playa beyond the headlights?

Any chance you have a photo of the screen?

The radar monitor was in a position that it was not observable from the drivers position. I made the judgment that it would be distracting to the driver of the vehicle. I researched the safe exposure distance of the specific unit I had and the manual stated that a distance under 3 feet directly in front of the emitter/receiver was an exposure level to avoid and that beyond 3 feet was safe. Depending on the sensitivity setting the unit easily picked up people and parked bicycles however only objects of formidable size had any dimensional resolution as the reflections were shown as green rectangles. I don't have any pictures of the system in action however it looked similar to this.

Sic Pup wrote:I don't know about all that but while stuck just off pavement on entry Monday we kept getting distracted by, what can best be described as, this pinging noise. Turns out it was the "sonar" unit on some giganticass sub/tandem-bus/mv that was too long to be turned around and sent back with the rest of the traffic on pavement. Made it all the more surreal, hail, submarines, Camp Purgatory.... yup, another day at BM.

Haha yeah. I was out there too at gravel camp and was wondering why they didn't turn the pinging off.

The rumors about discofish that I've heard is that it uses LIDAR, is run by Google engineers, and does self drive but people need to be "hands on" at all times.

Yes, that's what they told me! LIDAR, I couldn't remember what it was, but my campmate recognized it right off. We were hanging out for quite a while waiting for them to take off; wanted to be sure we got on the car. Nice people, tech geeks!

FLUR

(Just because it's a cool acronym.)

I sold my radar and screwed spikes into the tires.