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There's an App That Could Make Walking and Texting Less Deadly

Hey, idiot – are you almost getting hit by traffic every day because you can't put your smartphone down? Us too.

The life cycle of a smartphone. Picture via

If you've been wandering around staring at your phone, enslaving creatures and forcing them into battles for your own personal gain lately, you've probably walked into something. The good news? You're not alone. According to the oracle that is the "Daily Mail", 43 percent of young people aged 16 to 24 admitted to injuring themselves while their eyes were glued to screens last year. Which is why developer Maulik Shah has created an app to stop people bumping into stuff while using handheld devices. Type While Walk offers users a solution to problematic things such as oncoming traffic and other people by repurposing your phone's camera to provide you with a real-time video of your immediate surroundings.

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I am a dawdler with little to no regard for the people and things around me, so I used Type While Walk on the streets of east London, which is full of feckless and clumsy young people, to see if I'd sustain fewer "millennial injuries" than usual. The results were mixed.

I started walking, and started to write a message at the same time. Reckless! The first thing I noticed was that Type While Walk really messes with your depth perception; gutters suddenly seemed a lot further away than they actually were, which caused me to trip up more than once while I inched down the stairs at Old Street station. Pro tip: if you're going to use the app, do not attempt an escalator at the same time. Static steps are one thing; moving steps had me fearing for my life.

In an attempt to avoid a fatality, I activated the speak-to-type mode, which removes the need for typing completely and promises to recognise and record what you're saying. "Meet me at Homeslice?" I told it to ask. "Meet me at hand" appeared on the screen. Intriguing and mysterious, but not all that accurate. I had to go back to typing to correct it, which meant leaving the app, which meant I was vulnerable to the hazards of the outside world for more than a few seconds.

But I immediately felt a sense of relief; in order to reap the full rewards of the camera-assisted super-vision, you're forced to hold your phone at an awkward angle to pick up on anything other than feet, which – let's be honest – your peripheral vision accounts for anyway, given that most of us have evolved into professional text-walkers by this point in history. I was tired of aimlessly bumping into things and tired of holding my phone out. I needed the real world. I quit Type While Walk. Then opened up CityMapper. Hey, I'm foreign. I have no idea where I'm going in London at the best of times.

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@YasminJeffery

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