DRADIS from BitPorters Media: An Example of Innovation on Windows Vista

I came across this really incredible article posted on the BitPorters Media blog. The premise of the article is an entry to the Windows Vista CodeMaster Challenge called DRADIS, which is an information-gathering in-car "dashboard" application that picks up elements of the surrounding environment and relays them to the vehicle's driver. DRADIS stands for "Direction-Range-Distance", which are the main data pieces captured and presented by the system.

Windows Vista and related technologies feature prominently in the invention. It's safe to say that without Windows Vista, this application would be less feature-rich and not end up being nearly as advanced as it is. DRADIS makes use of the vector graphics and dynamic display capabilities that are fundamental to Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and also takes advantage of two technologies enabled only in Windows Vista: pen input gestures, or "flicks", enabled by running Windows Vista on a TabletPC, and speech recognition, which is also a fundamental part of Windows Vista (all SKUs). One really cool aspect that links both technologies is that they both train themselves passively by indexing the hard drive in the background. This means that common terms, proper nouns, names, acronyms and the like are all taken into account when you're using either the handwriting recognition or speech recognition technologies in Windows Vista. So if you're fond of the term "vis-à-vis" or frequently use the name "Sofia" in your emails, for example, both technologies will pick up on that and increase the likelihood of recognition. This passive learning occurs simply by improving the recognition engines' stochastic models so that they're more apt to distinguish between words and names you use or refer to regularly in documents and communications, and others that could otherwise yield a false recognition match.

Aside from serving navigational and environmental information relay purposes, DRADIS takes advantage of all the on-board technologies found in Windows Vista. Among these are media playback, which allows vehicle occupants to enjoy any audio stored on the PC's hard drive. Text-to-speech gives the driver the option of turning off the radio and listening to playback of emails, RSS feeds, Web sites, etc. (Look out NPR.) Mapping functions pulled from Windows Live Local (previously MapPoint) further enhance the value of text-to-speech by re-creating the Hertz Never Lost scenario -- only without the annoying canned voices that system uses. Windows Vista's voice recognition capability allows the driver to direct the system according to his/her particular needs -- say, to repeat certain information or skip an irrelevant section of an email.

Pretty cool stuff -- let's see how this entry ultimately places in the CodeMaster Challenge contest.