Augmented Reality Coming to Your Windscreen

BBC Future - Dec. 2, 2012 by Jon Stewart

The Mercedes Dice concept allows car passengers to call up information about passing landmarks (Copyright: Daimler AG)

The dangers of talking on a mobile phone or texting whilst driving are well known.  So adding what, on first glance, look like added distractions may not seem like the best idea.

But researchers and car firms are increasingly looking to give drivers enhanced, or augmented reality (AR) that adds extra information ranging from directions to social media feeds to the view through the windscreen. And, perhaps the most unintuitive part of it is that it is designed to make the roads more secure for all of us.


“The biggest way augmented reality can be useful is in supporting safe driving,” says Professor Anind Dey, of the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. “The ability to enhance information around us that might otherwise be opaque to us is invaluable.”

AR is usually considered to be a live view of the real world, onto which extra data – usually pulled from the internet - is layered or superimposed. It is similar to the view of the world that Arnold Schwarzenegger had in the Terminator movies.

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