Sound Pryer: Adding Value to Traffic Encounters with Streaming Audio

We present a novel in-car entertainment application that is inspired by listening to music and the social interaction of manoeuvring in traffic. The Sound Pryer is a peer-to-peer application of mobile wireless ad hoc networking for PDAs with the intent of adding value to mundane traffic encounters. In essence it works like a shared car-stereo. Besides playing your own music, it allows prying on the music played by other Sound Pryer applications in other cars close-by. It accomplishes this during brief traffic encounters by peer-to-peer RTP multicast streaming MP3 music files. Through field trial we found that user appreciated the concept, but the prototype needs some improvements, foremost in terms of audio playback.