Watch Your Step: As If Glasses Couldn’t Get Any Geekier

Hey, eyes on the road, hero, do you want to get us killed? Sadly, current navigation technology leaves us little choice but to devote considerable time to a separate screen if we want visuals to accompany the sexy female computervoice (or Snoop Dogg, or Mr. T, or Gary Busey, or whatever you have installed… Gary Busey is frankly still pretty soothing).

But lo! Check this out. Combining two geek staples – that is, glasses and LEDs – engineers at the University of Electro-Communication  in Japan (swear to Odin that’s a real place) have developed a system that… well, by all rights, feels like it should have been developed in 2001.

The system works by gathering your position via GPS, and displaying directions via a magnetic sensor and blinky lights in your peripheral vision. If the lights are red, you’re headed the wrong way. If green, you’re not. Simple as that. While this doesn’t feel like the most revolutionary breakthrough of 2010, it’s certainly an excellent way to keep people’s eyes on where they’re going, and their noses out of their TomTom. Y’know, lest you wander into a… big hole, or something. I dunno, whatever people wander into. Poles.

Oh, hey, someone left a video here. You’re into videos, yeah? You should watch this one.