WOULDN'T it be nice if, next time you want to overtake
a big, plodding vehicle on a narrow road, you could see right through
it to the stretch ahead?
A new augmented reality system aims to make that possible, allowing you to time your overtaking safely.
Michel Ferreira
and his colleagues at the University of Porto in Portugal developed the
See-Through System, which uses a lightweight heads-up display to look
"through" a truck up ahead. The system works by looking through a camera
that records the trailing driver's perspective. Software recognises the
back of the lead vehicle, and replaces it with a video feed from a
webcam mounted on that lead vehicle.
The image has a delay of 200 milliseconds,
however, so it shows an oncoming car to be 10 metres further away than
it actually is, if both it and the driver's car are moving at 90
kilometres per hour.
Hannes Kaufmann
of the Vienna University of Technology in Austria worries it could be
dangerous. "I think it's a good idea to support drivers to judge
situations better, but it's a two-edged sword. What if the image
transmission stutters?"
The system was presented at the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality in Adelaide, Australia, this month.
This article appeared in print under the headline "The car in front has just turned see-through"
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