Your iPhone may soon be driving you

Most iPhone users find their phones become an extension of themselves, as more and more applications continue to show them new ways to make their lives easier and more convenient.

Apart from being enormously addictive, the iPhone does have its very practical uses. A new application for iPhone though, may just trump anything the phone users have had so far. If the application becomes commercially available in the future—your phone might just be driving you around town.

Researchers from the artificial intelligence team from the Free University of Berlin have come up with iDrive application, which converts your regular old iPhone into something straight out of a video game parlour. With a controller equipped to direct a vehicle’s movements, and separate buttons for braking and accelerating, this is the closest we’ve ever come to have automated driving for cars.

The iDrive application was tested on a two-tonne minivan. The application comes with a steering feature that uses the iPhone’s motion-sensing technology to “drive” the vehicle.

During the test, a remote driver was able to navigate the vehicle using a live video stream from a camera. The test drives were labeled “Spirit of Berlin”, and showed the van doing some clever negotiation of turns and bends.

Although not yet commercially available, this application may just be the sign of things to come. For years, researchers have been striving to come up with workable plans for “intelligent” vehicles that could drive themselves by studying and reacting to their environments and surroundings.