Augmented Reality is here and it will continue to evolve side by side with us through the years – we keep finding new uses for it every day and in almost every industry.
Augmented Reality is not to be confused with Virtual Reality: while Virtual Reality creates a completely different world for us to see and play around in, Augmented Reality layers data over reality, adding to what we can see or take away the things we don’t need.
It’s was a matter of time before our cars would start to reap the benefits of Augmented Reality too.
One of the most interesting examples so far has to be GMC’s 2020 pickup, which will offer a Transparent Trailer Rear Camera View option.
This option makes the trailer ‘invisible’ to the driver and instead superimposes a view from the trailer’s back camera to show them what’s happening in all the blind spots they can’t see just by using the rearview mirrors.
Aside from external cameras, we’ve seen the emergence of interactive dashboards across a number of concept cars this year.
Mercedes loves AR navigation, for example, and it has added it to the smart dashboard of its A Class vehicles. The instructions are laid over real-time objects observed via the cameras – whether it’s street names, turn instructions or addresses, they all pop up as you go.
Mercedes plans to actually move this sort of navigation away from the dashboard and onto the windshield and bring the Augmented Reality concept out on the road, so to speak.
Toyota on the other hand, realized how boring long trips can get, especially for the passengers, even more so if they happen to be children, so it has developed a system that can put to use the back car windows. The passengers can interact with them in different ways like drawing or using them to find out more information about the objects far away or zoom in on the scenery.
Toyota also added a Window to the World option to these windows, a tool that can auto-translate the signs on the road in different languages, an useful feature if you happen to travel abroad.
Other carmakers downright used Augmented Reality to help you engage with their cars long before even buying them.
BMW, for example, will let you not only pick your car but also the colors and options you’d like, walk around the vehicle, get inside it and drive it around, all made possible thanks to an iVisualser App.
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