FlightDeck

experiment.

I listen to podcasts on my bike. I found myself annoyed with the audio controls on the lock screen. They are too small, and far too error-prone. So I built an app to solve for this. It has large distracted-operation-friendly fast-forward and rewind buttons, and volume controls. As four buttons are a little boring, I then asked myself: what else would be interesting to know, even if not terribly important?
Directional heading? After all, our phones have compasses in them. For that matter, they have a whole series of accelerometers; from there it wouldn’t be too much to figure out where the horizon is in relation to the angle of the phone. And it’s got a barometric pressure sensor, too; I’ll bet I could figure out the altitude with that. Even a rough estimation would be pretty cool.
That’s exactly what I did. Designed in the aesthetic of the HUD in an actual fighter jet, the project took me a couple weekends to work out. Though, it’s probably not flightworthy, per se: the horizon / pitch indicators are super jittery, as the handlebar mount transmits and amplifies every single detail that the road has to offer. The altimeter is not terribly accurate, as barometric pressure unsurprisingly changes with the weather. The buttons still require my actual fingers; or, failing that, touchscreen-friendly gloves.
The two bars between the buttons are the progress of the current track / podcast, and the current volume. A future version might react to the ambient light available, green for light, red for night; introducing a radar feed and a voice-to-text note-taking mechanism is already somewhere in the pipes.