Dylan Benzekry's DOOMSCROLLER 3000 Warns of Obstacles as You Obsess Over Social Media
Can't look up from your phone? Sick of walking into walls, doors, people, and busy traffic? The DOOMSCROLLER 3000 is for you.
Maker Dylan Benzekry has designed a smartphone accessory designed to make obsessive doom-scrolling a little safer, if only physically and not mentally: an obstacle-avoidance system called the DOOMSCROLLER 3000.
"Did you just find out that the architecture project you’ve been working on for weeks was a colossal failure? Well that's great news! Because now, you can give up on your dreams and spend all your time scrolling on reels," Benzekry jokes. "And, with our new invention, you don't even have to take a break to look up. Introducing this new high tech device that we call the DOOMSCROLLER 3000, [which] conveniently attaches to your phone and employs ultrasonic sensing technology to alert you of danger ahead, using bright red led lights and a harsh buzzing alarm, all without ever needing to take your eyes of their screen."
The problem of smartphone distraction is a real one: whether it's doom-scrolling social media or looking at a map for guidance, people walking with the eyes on the screen rather than the world around them can find their journeys interrupted by, at best, collisions with other pedestrians and immobile objects and at worst walking into unnoticed traffic.
The DOOMSCROLLER 3000 "fixes" this problem by strapping an Arduino or compatible microcontroller board to back of the phone, linked to a trio of ultrasonic distance sensors — devices that emit an inaudible tone and listen for the echo, using the delay between the two to calculate the rough distance between the sensor and a sound-reflective surface. If you're getting close enough to said surface for a collision to be imminent, the microcontroller triggers visual and audible alerts via LEDs and a buzzer — even showing you the angle from which danger approaches.
"You may be wondering how you can take this project and improve it going forward. Our team is currently working on developing the DOOMSCROLLER 3001, which would bring updates," Benzekry says. "Firstly, we would experiment with feeding our sensors into a spectrum of RGB LEDs allowing users to better optimize their rerouted path. Lights could display a color hierarchy which corresponds with traffic and danger level. Secondly, we would improve upon the current attachment design to slot directly into a proprietary phone case (that we would also sell for immense profit)."
The current version is documented in full on Instructables, should you wish to build your own.