Forget smart cars; this device makes you feel like you’re driving in the future

Update [as of 1 Nov 2017]: We have received a few emails from customers who paid for this product on Indiegogo and hasn’t yet received it. Please note that this article does not endorse the product.

Did you know 1.25 million people die on the world’s roads in a year? In India, there is one road death every four minutes. These numbers might shock you, but they won’t make you a better driver or more alert while on the road. It’s only when an accident hits you or a loved one that you are forced to act. That’s what happened to Sunil Vallath.

He was a young man, utterly in love with his fiancée, Parvathy Sreekumar. They used to talk endlessly on the phone, even while driving. He was on the other end of the phone when she had an accident. She escaped unhurt but it shook Vallath up. It still gives him shivers to think of what could’ve happened if luck had run out on them that morning. The incident got the engineer in him thinking about a less distracting hands-free device that could help one stay connected without taking one’s eyes off the road. That led to Exploride.

In the ideal world, we would want to focus on the road completely while driving. But that is rarely the case on the ground. Apart from dealing with calls, music, or radio, there are the map-based navigators. Think of the Uber driver constantly glancing at his GPS-enabled smartphone attached somewhere above or beside him.

“I wanted to build an all-in-one, cell phone-cum-navigator-cum-reminder which will not distract the driver so much,” Vallath tells me as we walk down a winding pathway outside Startup Village in Kochi. This incubator in India’s southern state of Kerala is Exploride’s base for now.

The device that Vallath built – Exploride – is a transparent heads-up display (HUD) for cars. (An HUD presents information without requiring users to look away from their usual viewpoints.) Exploride lets you access music and maps, take or decline calls, change volume, read texts, and get alerts on a transparent panel fixed on top of the dashboard. And guess what, you can control it all with gestures and voice.

It moves car stats, mobile phone activity, and apps info away from dashboards or smartphone screens onto to a melt-into-the-windshield-like piece of glass.

The trip to Exploride

Vallath grew up in Palakkad, a small city in India’s southern state of Kerala. After completing his engineering, he joined Wipro, one of India’s top IT services companies. From there, he job-hopped across a few companies in the Middle East and was working with Al Muhaidib Group in Saudi Arabia when he started dreaming of starting up.

“I toyed with a few ideas initially. But it didn’t work. I wasn’t confident enough because I thought I lacked enough experience. I started a sustainable energy project, but it didn’t make the cut,” Vallath recalls. When the Exploride idea struck him, however, he knew straightaway it was a winner. He had a rough sketch in his head about how to build it. So, he quit his job and moved back to Kerala.

Vallath registered his startup in the district of Columbia in the US, roped in computer engineer Vivek Mohan, who had been working on gesture-controlled devices, and also bagged seed funding of US$65,000 from private investors. Not to forget, in the middle of all this, he also married his fiancée.

It took the Exploride team over a year to build a prototype. It wasn’t a simple device to build. And yet, for the user, it had to be simple, sleek, and useful. It had to do most of the things a smartphone does and more.

Inside the device