The New York Times had an interesting article yesterday about cutting-edge research that Toyota is performing in striving to make driving more fun.  Four Toyota employees recently were awarded a U.S. patent for a concept car that will enable drivers to better communicate with each other, by empowering the cars to glare angrily at another car cutting through traffic.  The main features include headlights that vary in intensity, hood slits and other detail can that look like eyebrows, eyelids or tears. 

The main idea behind this concept is to make the driver and occupants develop even more of an affinity for their car, thereby creating even more customer "stickiness".  The benefits are manifold:

• to create a more positive mood
• to let the other drivers know about the feelings of a particular driver
• to provide extra feedback and signaling, indicating feelings such as surprise or gratitude for yielding the right-of-way
• to customize a response system that can automatically express some of these emotions, no matter who drives the car

The car's AI (Artificial Intelligence) is pretty sophisticated because of the complexity of determining the appropriate emotion given a certain situation.  Data on the state of the car, the road,  and the driver is gathered and stored on the car's computer.  That intelligent system assigns points to some factors, such as speed, brake pressure, or handling angle, that can, for instance, contribute to a change to an angry mood (from a normal mood). Therefore, when a certain threshold number of points is reached (e.g. potentially pointing to an angry response), the car's computer software will cause the external part of the car to change accordingly.

My own thoughts on this car?  Interesting concept - it's too early to tell whether it will fly in the current state, but there is a lot of potential.  I would personally soup this idea up with a few extra features, including:

• biometric verification (excellent security feature) - I would complement the regular keyless combo lock with a speaker verification system that would match a person's voiceprint 
• a smart traffic system that would get traffic location from WiFi/WiMax dedicated hotspots around the city and warn the driver not to take certain areas (basically, an enhanced version of OnStar, with traffic  
• a speech synthesizer that would give the car a voice and remind the driver to perform certain tasks such as filling up the gas tank, changing oil, adding windshield washer fluid, etc. or even better yet - warning about speed limits or wreckless driving. 

The highly creative patent can also be applied to motorcycles, ships or aircraft.

When I brought up the topic of digital information capture and processing in an earlier thread, I forgot to mention about a solution which I recently tested at a demo in town.  It turns out that MTS Allstream (TSE:ALR), Canada's third largest communications service provider, also has an offering in this space: Allstream Digital Ink.

The concept is a bit of a twist to the Sony/Philips/E Ink idea, although the difference in technology name is pretty subtle (electronic ink versus digital ink).  The solution relies on a digital pen (and a mini-docking station for the pen), digital paper and some client and integration software (including a registered application handler).  Two client versions exist: one running on Windows 2000 and the other on Windows XP.  The server managing all the data runs on either Linux or Windows 2000.  The mini-docking station plugs into a PC via a USB connection.

The digital pen uses normal ink for writing and scans the paper as things are written via the pen's camera technology.  Allstream maintains that the results are pretty similar to most optical scanners available today, without requiring the infrastructure and costs associated with a high-res scanner.  The ink can be standard ballpoint blue, and there are several vendors that manufacture the pen, including Nokia, Logitech and Sony.  In my demo, I used the Logitech pen shown in the figure. 

The digital paper essentially is any business form with faint watermark consisting of a series of dots arranged in a mathematical pattern.  The idea is for the pen to record its position on the paper as things are jotted down.

While the user fills out the form, the pen captures all the information.  At the end of the process, the user docks the pen and the pen's strokes are sent to a registered application handler via a secure Internet connection.  Handwriting recognition algorithms are applied along with business rules and voila! - the end result is an electronically stored form (which can be converted into data or stored as a high-res image).

The pricing per seat, including the hardware and the software starts at roughly $725, depending on the volume of the deal.  Allstream saw a business opportunity on the bureaucratic modus operandi of North American firms (there are over 1 billion paper forms in the market).  Obviously mishaps happen (about 3% of paper documents are filed incorrectly, and 7.5% go missing).  The costs associated with those incidents can be huge: finding a misfiled document costs Can$120, while reproducing a lost document can entail Can$220, according to a Cap Ventures Inc. 2002 report.  And this is the niche that Allstream is trying to explore.  All in all, it was a pretty impressive demo.