Recently I’ve been working on a side-project with Warwick Manufacturing Group to create a simple research-gathering application, using Flex. The application work itself isn’t anything clever, just some video/audio and basic data collection, but the research project is quite interesting – electric vehicles don’t make a lot of sound, and cars that don’t make any sound may cause more pedestrian injuries and accidents because people can’t hear them coming. Researchers are now looking at how to alleviate this problem by generating sound from the vehicle like an engine, but not necessarily the sound of an engine. In fact the sound could be anything at all.

This project is called ELVIN (ELectric Vehicle with Interactive Noise) and is a cute little van that will drive around playing a range of sounds. The purpose of the application is to allow people to evaluate the sounds used by the van, and the data gathered will be used to inform further research into safety and a number of other factors, including nuisance and brand perception – imagine living next to a busy road full of all-electric cars generating the same monotone sound, or a hybrid Ferrari that sounded ‘wrong’. There’s also big potential for aftermarket products; in twenty years’ time instead of a performance exhaust system you might just purchase an upgraded sound.

It’s interesting stuff, and it was fun to create a little app to help this research along. It’s already gathering useful data about perceptions to the current sounds the van is evaluating, but they need as much data as possible – to find out more about the project and to try it for yourself, head to http://go.warwick.ac.uk/elvin