Livemap is a Russian startup developing motorcycle helmets that project GPS navigation and accept voice control directly in the rider's field of vision. The team spent the past year building a pre-production prototype of its optics, which are composed entirely of aspheric lenses to enable a smaller, lighter, and sometimes cheaper design than multi-lens systems. A major focus has been creating a design that keeps optics costs down while maintaining a transparent display that shows maps without obscuring the road. Livemap plans to unveil its prototype in the spring and begin sales this summer in its first market, the United States. To support prototype development, the company received a 14.7 million ruble grant (a little under $300,000) from the Russian Ministry of Science. The CEO, Andrew Artishchev, has also commented publicly on competitors such as Skully and Nuvz, and the company previously participated in TechCrunch’s Hardware Battlefield at CES. Livemap demonstrated its Motohelmet concept — a motorcycle helmet that projects navigation into the rider’s field of view using a transparent beaming scheme — at CES. The helmet runs Android, uses Nuance-based voice control and NAVTEQ mapping data, and hides the projection hardware inside the shell so the image is not visible from outside. The team, which includes engineers with experience from Sukhoi, has moved from a full-face prototype toward a modular insert that can be integrated into existing helmet shells to reduce production cost. At CES they showed the actual in-visor display and a voice-controlled navigation app giving accurate directions around San Francisco. Livemap says it has deals with key manufacturing partners and plans to start selling in the US and Canada in the last three months of 2014 for $2,000, with a $500 pre-order discount available. The company positions the product as distinct from mountable GPS units and compares it to Google Glass while claiming better image quality and a less intrusive field-of-view.

Total raised

$1M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Grant

Latest activity

Dec 2014