We are display technology, software design and mobile device development experts that happen to love riding and want to stick to our core competency. It's taken us years to become leaders in the wearable display technology market and we understand that you can't become a helmet manufacturer overnight. Helmet manufacturers are the experts in designing safe, comfortable and affordable protection for your head and we all love our current helmets, brands, colors and styles. We want to offer the NUVIZ experience to every motorcyclist at the lowest possible barrier of entry, which means: you continue using the helmet you already own and like and we provide you with our HUD.

The first generation NUVIZ Ride:HUD will require a full-face or modular/flip-up helmet due to the mounting position on the lower right chin bar. A visor is not required. Ride:HUD will work without a visor (e.g., goggles) and/or with a visor cracked or fully open. We plan on bringing an open face helmet compatible NUVIZ Ride:HUD to the market as soon as possible.

Not at first. Ambient wind, exhaust, and street noise inside your helmet may make voice controls unreliable. Instead you will be able to easily navigate the user interface using the Bluetooth connected remote control.

Of course we are aware of previous and ongoing attempts of bringing a display to the motorcycle helmet. (As rider’s we’ve even tried to back them!) But by definition, a HUD is a transparent display that presents data to the user. This has not been done before, hence our claim, but with your help, we will be the first generally available HUD for motorcycle helmets on the market.

When we set out to determine what functionality to include a rearview camera was certainly one of the features we initially thought would be nice – but in the end we did not include it for a few reasons:

- The information presented to the user on a near to eye display or head-up display need to be minimalistic and intuitive. Streaming video of what's behind was often reported in tests to be distracting and still did not replace checking your mirrors or looking over your shoulder.
- A camera on the back of your helmet will move with your head at all times. If you look to your right, you will see what’s behind you on your left side, etc. This is difficult for your brain to correlate where the camera is looking with what you’re seeing.

That said, we believe that Ride:HUD can serve as the central hub for many of the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi enabled devices along with your smartphone - except Ride:HUD has a display that is always available to you! A wireless camera attachment to the back of the bike (not the helmet) is something we will investigate as we continue to build out the complete ecosystem for NUVIZ.

Expected battery life is at least 4 hours of continuous usage. Shooting non-stop HD video for example will drain the battery faster. Unfortunately battery development has not caught up with other technologies and every mobile device manufacturer faces the same challenge - including us. The batteries are replaceable so you can bring an extra one and swap them out on those longer rides. We will also provide an ability to charge off of the bike’s 12V power.

We are currently designing the Ride:HUD to meet an ingress protection (IP) rating baseline of IP-53. The first digit '5' means "Protected from limited dust ingress", and the second digit '3' means "Protected from water spray less than 60 degrees from vertical". We are keeping in mind the possible need to move up our second digit rating to a '5' (IP-55), which includes the original dust protection, as well as "Protected from low pressure water jets from any direction". After we are funded and can extensively test prototypes of the device in all inclement weather conditions, we can make a final determination of the IP rating needed.

This is a great point! We did try nearly every possible position both inside and outside the visor during our design process. The two least distracting areas were top right and bottom right, centered inline with the eye looking directly forward. (same goes for the left side but that’s a personal preference). You don’t do top center or bottom center because it requires both eyes to make gross muscle movements to focus on the center of your view which then causes a latency when focusing back on the road. Designing an add-on unit for the top left or right makes it nearly impossible to use your visor but we did have a few design candidates for this. In the end, our human trials found that riders are actually very comfortable looking even further down than our device(i.e. at mirrors or gauges) and were happy with the placement. Once we picked the location we were able to design for focal length. This means that unlike when looking at your instruments which are near to you, you don't need your eye to flex to change its focal distance to look at HUD images that render in the distance. It ends up being faster to focus on the display and back to the road than any other way. A lot of this experience is also taken from the work we’ve done with the military where we’ve worked with dozens of Army units learning how soldiers can focus on their weapon, the foreground, and the screen in an optimal way.

Yes. Over time, we certainly hope to offer more models but we have to start somewhere.

Unfortunately we will have to focus our development efforts in stages, with Android and iOS targeted for the initial product launch. We know that this will be very disappointing for Windows users (including a few on our own team). Depending on market share, licensing costs, and development bandwidth by summer 2014 we may change our current assessment and make a windows app available from the beginning. Please continue to follow us and thanks for your support!

The way Kickstarter works is that you pledge a certain amount for whichever reward you would like and your credit card only gets charged at the end of the campaign IF we are successful and reached our funding goal. If we don't reach the goal Amazon Payments will automatically cancel your pledge. Please refer to the Kickstarter FAQs for backers if you have additional questions and concerns about the Kickstarter process. We are very optimistic to reach our funding goal and move forward with our development - please help us spread the word!

Magic! Actually we are working on getting CAN-to-Bluetooth and J1850-to-Bluetooth compatibility with a number of different bikes. By summer, we expect to support a wide variety of bikes, however, that does require an extra adapter. They aren’t terribly expensive but we’re working on finding and recommending the best ones over the next few months.

Yes, your visor can be opened and closed without any problems. In designing Ride:HUD it was very important for us to be able to see the image with your visor partially cracked or fully opened.

We are working to make sure that maps work offline though we may not be able to cache all resolutions. Part of this will require that you at least planned your route while you had connectivity. It will not have full global street maps pre-installed on Ride:HUD.

Yes, the device will be primarily constructed of a high strength blended plastic, for example ABS and polycarbonate, which will provide it with a very rugged housing designed to survive both drops and debris.

We plan on supporting both helmet measurement (agreed, that’s not terribly accurate but may be interesting for some people) as well as cooperative data from cell-phones that support sharing IMU data. We’d love to know what sample speeds people would be interested in and in what scenarios.

This is an excellent question. Reading glasses are not required to see the image. The focal length of the virtual image is set at the usual distance your eyes are focused at while riding. Your eyes do not need to accommodate to the physical distance of the HUD. Other prescription glasses should not cause any problems viewing the information on the display either.

This is not designed to be safety gear. However, like the National Highway Safety Board suggests with proper HUD’s in general, we do hope that a device like this helps people be safer by not looking away from the road. It’s probably a good time to point out that the entire interface was designed following best practices for see-through displays AND the design guidelines found in the “Department of Transportation / NHTSA's Driver Distraction Prevention and Reduction Guidelines”

Awesome! That is a very interesting application that we haven't thought about yet. If that’s your bag, you probably shouldn’t fund the Kickstarter but come have a beer with us to discuss future development for NUVIZ!