Today’s post is about bikes and how they can be customized to match your taste. The latest accessory to hit the market when it comes to motorbikes is ‘wheelies’, a tire upgrade that is in essence an LED screen capable of displaying billboards, animations, texts or videos. The gadget has been developed by a Tech company called World Moto and based in Bangkok. This upgrade turns your conventional bike wheel into a LED screen. World Moto has managed to keep the display stationary even when you are traveling on the motorbike, that means the display is unaffected by the revolutions that the tire goes through.
Paul Giles is the CEO of World Moto and he said; ‘The technology has the potential to turn essentially any wheel in the world into a brilliant, full-color billboard or video screen. It gives their bike a face, sort of like an avatar.’ If you have not seen the ad yet, it is quite funny and involves some hot girls choosing a geek with the wheelies as compared to a stud. The Wheelies is able to play a 30 seconds video on loop, and research is being carried out to make it possible for the wheelie to stream full length videos. However, there is limited practical use when you think about it but it sure is fun.
So how do these ‘wheelies’ work? The idea is a simple one; persistence of vision. The idea involves generating an illusion of motion when still images are made to move at high speeds. In other words, the images are in fact moving along the tire but when they move at this speed they appear to be static and hence, you get the illusion that the display is constant even when the wheels are in motion. The wheelie has 424 LED lights which are fixed on the eight spoke wheel and controlled by a computer that caters for the wheel’s speed and the position of each spoke during movement.
World Moto’s Chief Technology Officer, Chris Ziomkowski said; ‘You have to track the where the wheel is at any given time and have to know the exact position of each blade. Then you have to light the LEDs based on what you want the picture to be, and you have to do that very fast.’ He also told that the idea of wheelie came to his mind thanks to the light-sabers in Star Wars film and the scene where it was spun in the air.
The Wheelie was exhibited at Sign Asia Expo and the expected price tag should be somewhat around $1,000, depending upon the size of wheel. So the real question is; Is it really worth it? Would you get it on your bike? Let us know in comments
