‘Hi! This is your phone to say your train is late’: how technology is changing transport

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jun/14/how-technology-is-changing-transport-imagine-festival

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Want to experience driverless pods before they hit the road? Fancy dodging transport problems before they happen? What about a system for rewarding those who walk rather than take the car?

At the Imagine Festival in Milton Keynes last week, the potential of technology to revolutionise the way we move about was on display, as a host of young entrepreneurs vied to offer creative solutions to 21st-century travel dilemmas.

Virtual reality systems, multidirectional treadmills and incentivising websites were among the innovations promising to transform not only our existing transport systems but to help develop new ones too.

Hoping to banish commuter blues for good is London-based Zipabout. Collating travel schedules, real-time updates, detailed weather data and the word on the street gleaned from social media, the team have created a platform that can be used by developers to create systems such as intelligent journey planners that tackle – and even anticipate – travel nightmares.

“The idea is that you wake up in the morning [and your] phone pings up a notification saying we know your train that you usually take is going to be delayed this morning because it’s raining, and it’s half-term and it gets really busy and [it] will proactively suggest that you take [a] different route,” says Zipabout’s technical director, Daniel Chick. The team are also working on a pilot in Oxfordshire that uses the platform to help operators to improve their services.

Others are dangling an appealing carrot in front of passengers to influence behaviour. Currently operating in Lowestoft, Suffolk, Bounce is a project that uses an interactive website to entice the public into embracing sustainable modes of transport – be it car sharing, cycling or using public transport. By logging journeys on the website during specific “challenge” periods, you can win rewards ranging from cinema tickets to vouchers for family trips. “Every time that [users log a journey], it’ll earn them some points, and the points will get them prizes,” says Stephanie Norris, a senior consultant with Integrated Transport Planning, which has developed the project. “You earn more points by using more sustainable transport,” she says, adding that a new challenge period is set to launch this month.

It’s not just our approach to journeys that looks set to get smarter – vehicles, too, are constantly being upgraded. Technologists at i-Abra have developed software that uses cameras, similar to those in mobile phones, to give vehicles “vision” in order to detect and recognise a host of obstacles, from bollards to children. Not only is the system cheaper than radar systems, they say, but, thanks to machine learning algorithms, it’s smarter than existing camera-based systems since it can be “trained” during development to improve its recognition prowess.

“We think that we’ll start to see this [recognition system] pretty mainstream [in] 18 months to two years,” says managing director Ian Taylor. When incorporated into a vehicle, says chief technology officer Greg Compton, the system could alert a driver to take action by means of an audible warning or holographic dashboard display, while it could even be developed to enable a vehicle to respond to potential hazards itself.

Virtual reality also looms large, with a host of innovations. Among them is the Omnifinity Omnideck 6, a device that sounds as if it came straight from the mind of Douglas Adams. A 360-degree treadmill hooked up to a VR headset and tracker system, the platform allows the adventurous to physically move around a virtual environment and come face to face with the future of transport. “We can put humans into a virtual world and they can see how [driverless] pods are coming towards them,” says Martin Pett, principal technologist at the government’s Transport Systems Catapult (TSC).

“There’s a whole load of questions there about that behavioural relationship between machine and human that we can experiment with – a whole load of different scenarios – really, really quickly and repeatedly.”

Previously deployed for military purposes, a commercial version of the Omnideck has been bought by the TSC and installed at the Imovation Centre with the hope that it will encourage businesses and researchers to use the system to explore human responses to novel scenarios. And with the Lutz Pathfinder pods set to be trialled in Milton Keynes later this year, the answers could prove invaluable both in developing the vehicles and alleviating concerns.

Geve is a company that is also planning to unleash virtual reality to combat apprehension over the future. Based on technical information, its immersive system can explore new developments. “The first thing you have got to deal with is the fear factor,” says co-founder Richard Johnston. Pop on a VR headset and it’s possible to explore, for example, the impact of a new train line on the living rooms of nearby houses. And it can help engineers too, with the simulated environment offering them the chance to identify and solve problems.

“‘Intelligent mobility’ is transforming the way we move people and goods,” says Dr Paul Zanelli, chief technology officer of the TSC, which ran the two-day festival at its Imovation Centre. “Our job is to try to create the environment where companies can see that the UK is a place to come and exploit that global opportunity,” he adds.

Ultimately, says Zanelli, technology has the potential to turn travelling into an efficient, sleek and enjoyable experience. “We can get a lot more out of what we have got just doing things more intelligently, and we can make the experience for people massively better,” he says.