Imagine a fog-shrouded morning when visibility is limited and you can barely make out the sides of a country lane or even major motorway. How about if the road’s margins and centre line were shown clearly on your windscreen?
General Motors and several universities are working on a system that would use data gathered from an array of vehicle sensors and cameras and project images generated by compact ultra violet lasers directly onto the entire of the windshield.
“We’re looking to create enhanced vision systems,†says Thomas Seder, group lab manager-GM R&D. His team is working
with Carnegie Mellon University and The University of Southern California, as well as other institutions, to create a full windshield
head-up system leveraging night vision, navigation and camera-based sensor technologies to improve driver visibility and object detection ability.“Let’s say
you’re driving in fog, we could use the vehicle’s infrared cameras to identify where the edge of the road is
and the lasers could ‘paint’ the edge of the road onto the windshield so the driver knows where the
edge of the road is,†Seder said.Coated with a series of transparent phosphors, which emit visible light when excited by
a light beam – in this case from a compact laser – the windshield becomes a large area transparent
display, instead of current HUD systems that use only a small portion of the screen.The company has published a number
of photos of the technology in action, and also included here is a video explaining the technology, shot by Wired.com