This article was taken from the February 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Rideye is like a black box for your bicycle. When his friend was injured in an accident in 2012, Los Angeles-based mechanical engineer Cedric Bosch, 23, started the project to prove the causes of accidents by recording HD video with a 120-degree-lens camera.
Rideye also uses GPS to log the cyclist's speed and position. The device, due for release in March, deletes footage after 2.5 hours, but if there's a crash, it saves and encrypts data so it can't be edited.
Crashes are identified using a three-axis accelerometer which measures the bike's orientation 1,600 times a second. "I rode around with a computer in a backpack, with wires dangling out of it to sensors all over my bike," says Bosch. More than a third of backers for Rideye's $32,000 (£20,000) Kickstarter campaign were from the UK, so Bosch asked them for localisation tips. They sent him videos of their commutes, which showed that UK cyclists ride much closer to motorists than in the US, a symptom of the narrowness of UK roads, compared to those in the US. This spurred the inclusion of GPS positional tracking in addition to video recording. "My hope is that cyclists will ride more safely knowing that they're being recorded, and the same goes for cars."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
