GPS Flashlight Gets You Home While Inviting the Neighborhood

Want to broadcast exactly where you’re going to every creep, psycho and oddball in the street? Want to make yourself look pretty queer while doing so? Similar to the MAPTOR concept, but a little weirder, the Tamtam Flash from Designaffairs Studio pounds a GPS unit into a flashlight so that you can project directions of where you’re going right onto the sidewalk in front of you. It can also beam a full map view complete with zooming and scrolling onto a wall.

The Tamtam is an interesting twist on GPS, but it’s a rather strange direction to take it in. It’s not quite clear how you’ll see a beam from a flashlight in the middle of the day, and it’s also not clear how you’ll prevent muggers/murderers/rapists/general riff raff from following that big, pretty beam. To make matters worse, the designers envision the system being used by tourists in unfamiliar cities. So you’ll already look like a hopeless, lost tourist and you’ll be shining a bright target mark right onto the pavement–you might as well just ask the shadiest guy on the block for directions and give him all your money, clothes and plastic before retiring to the gutter.

via Dvice