Smart swimming goggles
Given that most of the TD team are obsessive swimmers I can’t believe we missed this story of an intelligent pair of goggles from a few weeks back. Katie Williams, an industrial design student at Brunel University, the same place that brought us the first pair of MP3 swimming goggles a couple of years ago, has designed an innovative pair of swimming goggles that display lap count and time on the inside of the goggle lens, directly in the line of sight of a swimmer.
The system which is called Inview, incorporates an electronic device that houses a compass, at the back of the goggles head strap. So when a swimmer enters the pool, they press a button on the side of the goggles that activates the device and signals to the compass the direction the swimmer will be travelling.
Once the swimmer takes their first stroke, the goggles display the total time spent swimming, the number of laps completed and the time it took to swim the previous lap in a tiny heads-up display inside the goggle lens. Each time the swimmer makes a turn, the compass automatically detects that the co-ordinates have changed and registers the lap and time.
It sounds like brilliantly clever stuff, and let’s hope it makes it to market, hopefully with an MP3 player built in too.
