How many times do you find yourself wishing there weren’t any blind-spot while you were driving? If that could happen, driving would certainly become a hundred times safer. Jaguar Land Rover is working on how to make your car ‘disappear’ thus allowing drivers to be able to see without the car’s body blocking their view. The current research is focused on how to make vehicle’s roof support pillars see-through while also coming up with a ghost car navigation system.
Both the ‘Follow-Me Ghost Car Navigation’ and ‘360 Virtual Urban Windscreen’ being developed by Jaguar Land Rover along with a number of other technologies are aimed at improving safety. The basic idea is that by giving transparency to the roof support pillars, the driver gains a much better visibility all around the vehicle and thus the name 360.
How do they make pillars transparent or invisible? Well, they don’t actually. Screens are incorporated onto the inside of these pillars which display video feed being recorded from outside of the car. This lets the driver see what they would have been viewing in the first place if the pillars were not there. According to the company, this technology will only spring to life when necessary. That is to say, when a driver is checking the blind sport before executing a lane change, the screens would run the video feed while at other times they will be turned off.
Suggestions also include using the pillars in collaboration with a HUD. When a pedestrian crossing the road is detected, the pillars will become active making the driver see better. Once the pedestrian steps into the view through the windscreen, a red circle’s projection follows them and tracks the path. This projection is, of course, displayed onto the interior of the windscreen. The windscreen is being used as a HUD to try and reduce the time that the driver spends looking away from the window.
Follow-Me Ghost Navigation also works on the same principle and projects an image of a car which the driver follows turn-by-turn. Let’s see when this technology becomes available and how successful it proves to be. Check out the youtube video below for more details:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c98h41TkREA
Amazing, are these a standard feature in JLR?
CERTAINLY MIND BLOWING