What if Kitt from Knight Rider were a bike? And what if, instead of having a cool name like Kitt, it had a name like Precious? Well, you’d have a talking bike called, erm, Precious, complete with “cute” English accent.*
Precious is a tricked-out Specialized bike, and is being ridden across the U.S by Janeen, from the Atlantic to the Pacific to raise money for cancer research. Throughout the three-month trip, the bike will tell its side of the story via Twitter. How? Through the twin miracles of geeks and technology.
The bike is loaded with sensors, measuring everything from the temperature, humidity, grade, speed, cadence, travel-direction and position (via GPS). The on-board brain then parses all this information and sends it back to home base via text-message. To save batteries, the device sleeps and wakes up every five minutes to do its work.
Once the info is back on the mothership, the servers go to work. From the designers, BreakfastNY:
The servers look for patterns 24 hours a day, and if they find anything interesting, e.g. it’s been 80ºF with non-stop hills for two days, it will push a message expressing the bike’s feelings on the matter
The resulting Twitter stream is surprisingly lifelike and would certainly pass the Turing test. Precious even replies to Tweets from his followers. As of now, there are precious few (sorry) people following the bike on Twitter (just 160), but we can change that, right? Especially when the bike disses his rider like this:
Ohhhh, I know why her tongue’s hanging out. She’s seen “Lick Mountain” on the map. Loser.
You can also follow the progress and see the live data from the bike on the bike’s own site. It’s Flash, but don’t let that put you off. I.m not sure what part of this makes me the most jealous: the pimped-out talking bike or the fact that Janeen gets to spend three months riding across the country.
The Bike with a Brain [Breakfast NY]
Bike site [Yes I Am Precious]
*There is no such thing as a “British” accent.
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