The head-up display for motorcyclists: it’s the great white whale of the technology world. Over the years, we’ve seen at least a dozen different attempts to put information into the eyeline of the motorcycle rider, saving us from the horrible dangers of looking down at a speedometer or navigation system.

None have really taken the world by storm. HUDs seem to be very difficult to build into small helmets in a way that doesn’t compromise their safety in a crash, some of them are bulky enough to actually compromise the rider’s vision, and while their little displays tend to look pretty cool in mocked-up video advertisements, we suspect the majority don’t look nearly that good in the flesh.

So it seems to be a very hard thing to do, with relatively minor benefits if you manage to totally nail it. Still, people persist, whipped into a fresh and frothy frenzy every time a new sci-fi movie gets their juices flowing. The latest motorcycle HUD to pop up is the Aegis Rider, a spin-off from a project team at ETH Zurich.

If a typical HUD is difficult to execute, this one’s a doozy, because it’s an AI augmented reality overlay on the rider’s vision. Using cameras, deep learning and object recognition, it aims to detect hazards like pedestrians, other vehicles, bollards and animals, and highlight them in your vision with little colored boxes to make them stand out.

What’s more, it’s hooked up to mapping systems, and designed to paint the road with an optimal cornering line when you come up to a curve, giving you helpful little tips like “slow down,” “lean the bike over a bit more” and such. Oh, and you’ll get a nice constant display of your speedo, the current speed limit, navigation prompts and your current lean angle.

As such, this device is considerably larger than a helmet, and requires some bulky gear to be fitted to the bike itself, capable of pulling in vision and mapping data, live-analyzing it much like a Tesla Autopilot system might, re-mapping the resulting prompts from the rider’s point of view and transmitting an image to the rider’s line of sight.

Let’s assume Aegis Rider manages to perfectly achieve this AI/AR-enhanced vision of motorcycling bliss, exactly as shown in the promotional videos – an extremely generous assumption, I’m sure you’ll agree. Can anyone else see any problems here?

Aegis Rider

I’ll start: every colored box you put over a car makes it that little bit harder for the rider to see the tiny cues that set off our spidey senses: where the driver’s looking, what the pedestrian’s dog is up to, whether there’s a slight turning of the front tires that might indicate a stationary car is about to pull out into our lane.

And the idea of painting an ideal cornering line when you’re out in the twisties… It’s hard to imagine how this wouldn’t obscure your view of a diesel spill, or a critical bit of loose gravel, or a slippery road repair, or a rut or a dip or a crack or a puddle or a cowpat or a dead wombat or a Maccas wrapper some clown dropped out the window.

I don’t know what the roads are like around Zurich, but around here, every corner’s its own adventure, and the perfect line is just as often the cleanest, smoothest bit of road as it is the idealized wide-in, narrow-out textbook line that’ll be presented here.

Aegis Rider

So while the techie side of me applauds the effort this team is expending to AI its way to motorcycling nirvana, and marvels at the daunting challenges faced at every step of this project, the biker side of me is involuntarily reaching for a 10-foot pole to not touch it with. I doubt that I’ll need it; few of these things seem to make it from the Kickstarter phase into mass production.

Clear vision is the most important motorcycle safety factor a biker’s got, and filling that up with distracting flickering lights that literally go over top of the stuff we most need to see? I’m sorry, call me a luddite, but frankly I think this is smarty-pants tech for the sake of itself, and it’ll actually make riding more dangerous in the real world.

Not the fun kind of dangerous, either.

Check out a video below.

Source: Aegis Rider