Road-map wristwatch from 1920(core77.com)
core77.com
Road-map wristwatch from 1920
http://www.core77.com/blog/object_culture/roadbooks_part_4_the_wrist-mounted_original_23356.asp
11 comments
Brilliant design. Quickly, someone design a mashup with Google Maps + Google Web Fonts that spits out printable directions that work with this!
This would actually be a rather useful, real world use case for Little Printer: http://bergcloud.com/littleprinter/
There so much cool design and neat ideas that really were just ahead of their time to be found in the past.
My suspicion is that nearly everything people are breathlessly running to the patent office with these days thinking they've got something new, someone has already tried to pull off with gears and little bits of paper 100 years ago.
My suspicion is that nearly everything people are breathlessly running to the patent office with these days thinking they've got something new, someone has already tried to pull off with gears and little bits of paper 100 years ago.
They use similar roadbooks in the Paris Dakar rally for use on the motorbikes.
http://www.sbs.com.au/blogarticle/108976/Behind-the-Scenes-R...
"The glass window, an improvement on the original device as far as I can tell, stops the paper getting wet in the rain when you are driving your convertible sports car with the top down."
People drive in the rain with their tops down?
People drive in the rain with their tops down?
When Britain still was an empire, they didn't just complain endlessly about the weather. A little rain didn't deter anyone from cruising around in their Morgan...
Absolutely, when I had my Fiat, I drove all year round and almost never with the top up. Winter is so much fun with sun and warm heater on your face. A thick hat and blanket keeps it cozy.
Yes, cool people do.
This would be an excellent application for a Pebble e-ink watch. I would kill for something like this for motorcycle trips. The usual Google Maps on cellphone navigation isn't very useful, but having a small device strapped outside my jacket wrist with simple a nice big glove-usable button would be great.
The map-on-a-scroll idea was used commonly by aviators at the time, but their maps were strapped to their leg:
http://airandspace.si.edu/exhibitions/gal102/americabyair/ab...
http://airandspace.si.edu/exhibitions/gal102/americabyair/ab...
Pilots now have iPads strapped to their legs. Or, that's what a friend of mine does. It really useful (with a dedicated pilot app, not Google Maps), but they always have a "real" GPS onboard for backup.
This article is part of a series; glad to see they were aware of the two sports that use roadbooks today:
http://www.core77.com/blog/object_culture/roadbooks_part_3_r...
http://www.core77.com/blog/graphic_design/roadbooks_part_2_p...
http://www.core77.com/blog/object_culture/roadbooks_part_3_r...
http://www.core77.com/blog/graphic_design/roadbooks_part_2_p...
Great usability. This is awesome, put a big smile on my face. Very rare for a gadget to do that.
I wonder what other old fashioned gadgets could be studied to improve the user experience of today's software.
Steampunk! That's the coolest functional design I've seen all year.
That is a cool gizmo. Lots of interesting linear steps kinds of things you might do with it, like cooking for example, each step of the process scroll up to the next step.
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