曾经的“明星产品”在自家官网上发布了众筹视频，从此拉开了HUD市场的火热大战。
主要功能描述
1.蓝牙和网络连接——读取手机常用的提醒
用无线或蓝牙进行连接后，手机接收到短信或者来电的时候，Navdy HUD屏幕会自动显示。用户无需低头查看手机，即可快速处理。同时，因为搭配了微型运动传感器，用户可通过手势指定即可完成操作，相当酷炫。
2.内置GPS和离线地图——导航功能
当与手机连接时，Navdy HUD会根据导航信息来投影导航路线规划，并且做出实时的提醒。
3.OBDII接口——汽车诊断功能
通过连接汽车的诊断接口，它就可以实时监控汽车的燃油使用情况和车辆行驶速度，一旦监测到问题，比如燃油不足，Navdy HUD会自动在屏幕上进行提示，并导航去最近的加油站，同时也会在汽车发生重大故障的时候发出警报。
HUD设备的设计注意点
1.技术上：在挡风玻璃或者第三屏上进行成像，人眼需要感受到有一定的距离感；并且需要注意在不同的光线驾驶环境中的显示亮度。
2.信息展示的可控：在色彩选择上，需要与现实物体有一定的区分；展示内容也需要有取舍，注意避免对驾驶形成冗余信息干扰。
3.待体验的点：使用一段时间后，是否会对真实虚拟环境有混淆。
用户反馈
以下是用户的真实评价举例：（待整理）
They delivered what they promised.
- Navigation: The GPS consistently lags 3-4 seconds behind my current location. On multiple occasions, I have missed a turn because the device shows me another street away. The routes it selects are sometimes questionable. Not nearly as feature rich, accurate or helpful as the navigation on my Garmin device, or Apple/Google Maps on my iPhone.
- Music Controls: Great for someone controlling a small library or a few playlists, frustrating for anyone with a significant amount of music to navigate. Navdy will preload the information for the artist/album/playlist at the top of a menu, but takes a long time to load up that information for items further down the list. The Navdy does not cache any of the data, so it’s the same process each time you want to access your library. The Navdy also doesn’t recognize nested items, so no luck drilling down from an artist into his or her albums. Example… I can scroll to The Beatles, but instead of seeing all of their albums, you are instead presented with a list of all of their songs alphabetically. For someone with 24 albums and 516 songs by the Beatles, it is impossible to manage. I may be one of the few who purchased this device with music control as one of their top 3 features.
- Notification Glances: Excellent being able to see what phone calls, texts and emails are received while driving without having to handle my phone. However, replying is limited to placing and answering phone calls at this point, with no option to quickly reply to or generate a new text with an "On my way"/"yes"/"no" type message.
- Hardware: The design of my current auto would not permit me to mount the device flush to my dashboard, so the positive aesthetics take a small hit when using one of the taller mounts. The most significant issue is that road vibration is sent to the device with greater frequency when using these taller mounts. The display was already a tad blurry when projected to the edges of the glass, and this impacts readability of the display negatively as well.
- Customer Service: Management is exceptionally responsive to questions or concerns. Their website has an excellent portal for interacting with other customers, programmers and company management. Navdy is working hard to address numerous concerns and released updates to both the device and app weekly.
As an early adopter, you frequently are in position of an item with a few kinks that need to be worked out. However, some of the most important features I considered when I purchased this device are not yet fully baked. I really do want this product to succeed and I hope to revisit it down the line when some of these issues are worked out.
+ Good quality in material and packaging, great tutorial, the company really tried to make everything as good as possible, but I guess limited to current technology:
- Noisy fan and frequent reminder of being hot working in California
- IMPORTANT: graphic does not focus on the road, it is as far as the distance equivalent of over the hood, which means your eyes will constantly refocus switching back and forth looking at the road and the navigation
- Terrible Text-to-speech system, sounds like a robot using any of the built-in sound profile, very awkward, not even remotely as comfortable listening to it as listening to Google navigation
- Bulky and weird positioning using the high mount on a Prius, looks like a star war ship is standing on your dash
- Due to the fact I am using the high mount, image is not stable if there is noticeable car vibration
- The glass edge is very noticeable and disturbing/distracting while driving even if I am not using it, it is not as futuristic as seen on advertisement
- The image can be a little distorted if you do not spend a great amount of time trying to carefully position the device and the angle of lens
- Prius is a hybrid car, and it seems like when running slow in electric, the device cannot detect the car is on and the shutdown timer appears
- It is noticeably noisy when the ICE of the car is off stopping at traffic intersections. It does not apply to gasoline only car though.The engine sound should cover the light fan noise. But it is noticeable I believe for most hybrid or electric car.
- You basically have to sit one position or the image gets out of the frame, but not that much of a concern. However, if you share this car with others, seriously think about it, it might be inconvenient to adjust it for a few minutes every time.
- It takes the time I drive from apartment garage basement to main floor exit to fully start the device, so it doesn't bother me, but could be not as handful for some who parks the car in their house garage and expect to have it functional the moment they are on the road.
- There was one time the adapted brightness feature is not working
+ Software very well customized to the ingenious spinning wheel control design.
+ Really much better than any other under cheap third party head-up-display on the market
* So what I see from this device is due to the limitation of technology, HUD may just have to be the function you make a decision on when you buy your car. But you can definitely see that this company is trying very hard. Really awesome built quality. Just bad user experience.
I've had my Navdy for a few months now, and use it every day. There are plenty of video reviews to be found online, so I'll stick to describing a few features and topics that I don't see mentioned that much:
1. The installation is simple. It took me maybe 20 minutes, but that was mostly because I took the time to watch the extremely helpful step-by-step installation videos that are fed to you through the companion app during the installation process. It is basically plug-and-play. The unit sits on top of a mount/power pad that stays affixed to your dash. The mount adheres to your dash and is meant to stay in place (and it does), but the unit itself is easily removed - it securely affixes to the mount via strong magnets, but can be removed from the mount easily and quickly. I take my Navdy off my dash whenever I leave my car, and reattach it each time. Takes just a second or two to pop it on and off.
2. The Navdy itself has made me a safer driver, I think, in a few different ways: (1) It has helped me keep my eyes on the road more than before. No more glancing down at my car's dash to check on speed, or gas, etc. All of that information is projected in front of me. No more glancing at my phone at messages, either; (2) I find that I don't speed as much, because I'm more aware of my speed at all times - Navdy's interface shows you not only your current speed but also the current speed limit, and it does it both digitally and via an arc that changes color; white while you are within the speed limit, blue when you are a few miles above the limit (around 7-8), orange when you are doing more than that. I assume that there are colors beyond that but I haven't found out yet. It can also warn you audibly when you exceed the limit, but I turned off that feature pretty quickly.
3. Navdy is more configurable than you might think: Not only can you tweak the interface so that you pick and choose which widgets appear in your view as you drive (compass, time/date, next calendar appointment, current music, time and distance driven during the trip, etc) but you can also change things up on the fly quite easily. Plus, you can choose to get (or not get) what Navdy calls "glances" (think "notifications") from various apps. Want Facebook notifications, tweets, email, etc? You can enable it. Find having everything enabled too overwhelming or distracting (it is, IMHO), then you can toggle each option on or off. There's a good bit of granular control, so you can pick and choose what you want to be bothered by.
4. Navdy comes packaged in a manner reminiscent of an Apple product - securely and with everything in its place. It looks like a high-quality item, and it is. A few months in, I still haven't thrown away my box.
5. The post-purchase experience was reminiscent of TiVo - an email a day (more or less) explaining options and features and just generally making sure that you're having a good experience with the product. The hand-holding isn't really necessary, because the product is well-designed enough that its use is easily intuited, but having the email contact that first week was still nice.
6. Sound - Navdy doesn't have its own speaker, so all sound comes through your phone (or your car's stereo, via your phone's connection to the car). Navdy greets you (optionally) when you start your car, and Navdy shuts down automatically when you turn off your car. During the drive, when Navdy speaks to you, its in one of many voices you can select. iPhone tip: You can download and make accessible to Navdy some high quality voices by going into your phone's settings -- Settings/General/Accessibility/Speech/Voices - make sure you download the "enhanced versions." (Second tip: From that same area within settings, you can correct your phone's pronunciation for various streets and other things that it mispronounces).
8. Cable management - I suppose this depends upon where in your car your OBDII port is, but cable management is not a problem. There's only one cable, and it is thin (a bit thicker than a phone charging cable). Clips are provided to keep things well tucked away. In my car (a Honda Accord), I've got about a foot of visible cable, total. The part that goes from the back of the power pad toward the windshield, and isn't even in view when I drive anyway. The rest of it runs out of sight.
9. Car information integration - the widgets that are available to you will depend, I believe, upon the data your car's manufacturer makes available via the OBD-II port. Here's a scenario that can easily play out, given the Navdy's bridging of the information from your car and your phone: (1) You have an appointment at 10:00 AM listed on your phone's calendar. (2) You get in your car at 9:45. (3) Navdy assumes you might be going to this appointment, and suggests that it map the route for you; (4) Navdy, via the information from the OBD-II port, also senses that you are running low on gas. It offers to add a stop at a gas station along the route.
10. You can interface with Navdy with swipes of your hand (for accepting and dismissing certain glances), or via a little scrolling dial with a button that attaches to your steering wheel (for the majority of the interface). The latter works so well that I almost never use the former. Navdy is smart, though - it learns from you as you swipe and gets better at recognizing your swipes over time.
11. The information displayed on the HUD is viewable only to you. The person in your front passenger seat can't see it, from their angle. (The back passengers can see the info on the screen depending upon how they lean in and look. This affords you some privacy, but it also makes the Navdy kind of difficult to show off to people unless you have them sit in your driver seat. And Navdy is the type of thing that you are going to want to show off.
