"DON'T TEXT AND DRIVE!!"

I've had people yell at me to not text and drive so many times, I find myself doing the same to others now. But it makes a lot of sense. Thanks to the kind police officers pulling me over and sending me to STOP class (for turning right at a red light...how lame is that), I now have gruesome images of maimed bodies and mangled vehicle burned into my head that resurface every time I think about using the cell phone in the car. "IF YOU USE YOUR PHONE IN THE CAR, THIS WILL HAPPEN TO YOU!"

It reminds me of the scene in Mean Girls where the coach says "If you have sex, you will get pregnant and die!" But that's besides the point.

So common sense says horrible things don't necessarily have to happen the instant you touch your cell phone in the car, but the point remains: operating a cell phone in the car drastically reduces your ability to pay attention to traffic and react accordingly. I've even had a minor accident because I was distracted by my phone, but thankfully there was no real damage and nobody got hurt.

So I do a pretty good job now about not using my phone in the car. The other day, I realized there is another activity we tend to do that is just as distracting, yet nobody really says anything about it. We have portable music devices that hook up via auxilary line-in inputs or other adapters. We have thousands and thousands of songs on our iPods or Zunes that we can take with us in the car. The interfaces on them are pretty cool and allow for the browsing of media with just one finger. However, we haven't really improved the way we browse through media in the car.

Back in the "old days," we grabbed a CD and that's what we listened to for half and hour to an hour. In fact, I still do it that way predominantly. Having a whole catalog of music at our disposal allows us to be more picky about our music and often we find ourselves jumping around from artist to artist. And that's a good thing! I think it's awesome we have that kind of technology. However, I was driving around with my dad the other day and watching him go through his media device to look up some artist.

I realized we should come up with a better interface for browsing through artists, songs, and genres in a media library while driving. It needs to be something that will be efficient without compromising the ability to focus on the road. The Microsoft Sync technology seems to be taking a crack at that using voice recognition, but I've never used it so I can't really say much about it.

I was thinking perhaps a HUD interface might work well in the vehicle assuming it wasn't something that distracted too much from looking at the road. If it were the kind of thing that could be manipulated by finger gestures or by buttons on the steering wheel, it would allow the driver to browse for media while keeping hands on the wheel and eyes on the road.

Another interesting idea I thought about would be for the car to sense the moods or dynamics of the passengers in the vehicle and use that information to suggest music. What if it were like Pandora or Last.fm, except it could tell if you were in the mood for something upbeat or something mellow? What if the car were able to tell that I'm driving the car instead of my mother and select music from my favorite artists instead of blasting salsa music? Over time, the car could tell what the driver likes or doesn't like, and could use things like pulse, temperature, or other biometrics to determine what music to play. From there, the driver could make suggestions or alter the music as he or she saw fit.

Even other things like volume control? Perhaps the car can tell when people are trying to talk in the car and then it lowers the volume? There is already technology that can tell how fast you're going and adjust the volume to compensate for road noise. It's little features like that which allow the vehicle to be more responsive to the driver's needs.

Voice recognition technologies also probably have room to improve, and I'm sure there are good ways to leverage that to make selecting and enjoying music in the car a less distracting experience.

So I don't really have any more specific ideas or new directions to take on this, but for sure I see a need to redo the interface for music in the car. As technology allows us to take more music with us, we should figure out how to make the driving experience and the interface get up to speed. We should find a way to maximize entertainment value without compromising safety.

Ok, that's my rant.