Heimdall: scouting property from the windshield

Scouting neighbourhoods meant a passenger with a phone, a spreadsheet and a running commentary — and by the time anyone had looked up an address, the car had passed it. We built a phone app that watches where you are and tells you about the properties you care about as you reach them, with the relevant ones highlighted over the live camera view.

The situation

The work is real: drive the area, notice what is distressed, cross-reference it against what you already know. Doing it with a phone and a spreadsheet needs two people, and the passenger is always a few seconds behind the windshield. Anything that takes attention off the road is worse than not doing it at all.

What we built

The phone sits in a mount facing out of the windshield. It knows where the car is and which way it is pointing, and it calls out the properties that matter as you come up on them, out loud, so nobody has to look. On screen, the relevant ones are marked over the live view, with the frontage of a match picked out on the ground. Tap one and you get the deal card. The honest part is what happens at speed: precise visual placement genuinely cannot hold in a moving car — reflections and a static dashboard defeat it — so above walking pace the app switches to an approximate heads-up placement and says so, then returns to precise placement when you park and walk up. Pretending otherwise would have produced markers floating in the sky.

• Spoken callouts so nobody looks down while driving
• Properties of interest marked over the live camera view
• Precise placement when parked or on foot; approximate at speed, clearly labelled
• Tap a marker for the full deal card and owner contacts
• Every property in range marked, not only the ones already tracked
• Works against an area's parcel records loaded ahead of the drive

Interface illustrations. Abstracted representations with placeholder content — never client data.

What changed

One person can scout while driving. Every property in range gets marked, not just the ones already on a list, because on a scouting drive everything is a candidate until it is not.