Microsoft's Band 2 Could Be Your Guardian Angel Crossing The Road

Texting while crossing the road might be a shortcut to getting run down, but if Microsoft has its way your mobile device will act as a guardian angel. The company has teamed up with automated driving specialist IAV on a system whereby connected devices – like a smartphone, wearable, or something else commonly carried – can communicate the user's location to nearby vehicles, helping avoid collisions even when traditional cameras might not be able to see a potential accident.

Part of Microsoft and IAV's vision of vehicle-2-X (V2X) communications, where the car communicates with various aspects of the surrounding infrastructure, it's a combination of talkative road furniture and self-driving vehicle tech.

In the concept, a Microsoft Band 2 can communicate its location to lights, traffic signals, and other street furniture. That's processed via the Azure IoT Suite and crunched through Cortana Analytics for predictive hazard modeling, before being passed on to the connected car itself.

That way, should a pedestrian wearing the fitness tracker be behind a parked truck and about to step out into the road, even though the car's own cameras and other sensors can't physically see them, the cloud system would be able to flag up a potential hazard.

It's not the first such project we've seen. Honda, for instance, demonstrated a similar vehicle-to-pedestrian alert system last year, which used an app running on a smartphone to communicate with nearby traffic.

Of course, for any such system to be practical in the real world, it would require a common language for mobile devices and cars to communicate with, and the surrounding infrastructure of wireless repeaters that would serve as a link to the cloud.

Earlier today, Volvo announced plans to turn the Band 2 into a wireless speech-controlled interface for its future cars.