iPhone ARider: a head-up display for your bike?

The Apple iPhone is capable of some pretty cool stuff and we've seen plenty of people developing cases and chargers for keeping your iPhone with you on the go. The coolest bike application we've seen yet though is definitely the ARider HUD. The app uses the Google mapping and compass functions of the phone to feed a realtime map to an eyepiece that acts as a Head-up display.

There's a couple of obvious flaws to this prototype, the brainchild of Japanese innovators Ubiquitous Entertainment. the first is that the iPhone is currently placed on top of the helmet where it's a little, well, exposed. Also the compass would react to every turn of your head which would make the mapping confusing. It'd probably be better to mount the phone on the bike (or in a backpack) and run the cables up to the eyepiece.

The other drawback is the fact that it's not really a head-up display: you can't see through the eyepiece to the road, so it's obscuring one eye, presumably making all-important depth and speed perception much harder. We're not sure if there's a way round that... anyway, here's the video.