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Innovation

Nuggets: Navigate with your DVD

In-car wizardry from PanasonicPanasonic has come up with the perfect in-car accessory for people with bored kids and a bad sense of direction.
Written by Justin Pearse, Contributor

Its CN-DV2000 combines a vehicle navigation system with a DVD player. There's an optional 5.8-inch colour monitor, a digital sound processor, and a decoder for Dolby Digital and dts sound. You can also use it to play Video CDs and CDs.

The navigation system is based on electronically stored maps, which comes from the NAVTECH database and is stored on DVD-ROM. Your car's location can be found at any time via map matching use GPS (Global Positioning System) receivers. Map matching links the geographic data to the stored road and city map. Extra information comes from the speed sensor and gyro compass, making it possible to check and control a planned route.

Once you've chosen a destination from the road map reference, the system calculates the best route and displays it on the monitor. You can also tweak this, with requests like 'no motorway' or 'least time'.

To control all this in-car wizardry there's an interactive menu on the monitor and a remote control joystick. Extra features include zoom function and automatic magnification of unclear road junctions and roundabouts. The map can be displayed in varying scales from 1:1.5 million to 1:10,000.

Also, to stop you crashing as you keep checking the monitor, you can have directions spoken to you every 700 metres. Which could, depending on the sexiness of the voice I suppose, become very annoying.

There are no pricing details so far, but its out in autumn.


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