Soon enough, driving without seeing the speed of the vehicle projected on the dashboard will be inconceivable. Continental agrees with that, and its augmented reality heads-up display is evidence.
What Continental showcased is some sort of proof of concept, as the AR-HUD won’t be ready for mass production before 2017. I don’t think that the technology required for making this isn’t ready, just that there are aspects that need to be perfected.
Helmut Matschi, a member of the Executive Board at Continental, noted that “In a world that is becoming increasingly complex, the AR-HUD relieves the burden on the driver with a new quality of information. In the augmentation, we are connecting what the driver’s eyes see with explanatory information. The AR-HUD is an important step in the direction of holistic human machine interfaces in cars for a more comfortable, more economic, and safer driving experience. Drivers receive all important information before their eyes in an easily comprehensible way. This is a major step against driver distraction and sensory overload, both now and in the future.”
Eelco Spoelder, head of the Continental Instrumentation & Driver HMI business unit, added that “Every driver can experience the benefits of HUD technology, so we are expecting rapidly increasing equipment quotas in the near future. The AR-HUD is the next step in the evolution of the HMI into a holistic display and operating system for growing requirements. The AR-HUD function is creating a real dialog between the driver and vehicle.”
According to Spoelder, “This starts a new interaction between the vehicle and the driver. The vehicle shows the driver what the assistance systems can see and what they are doing. This creates trust and will also help to create acceptance for current and future driving functions. […] Our many years of experience with HUD technology helped significantly with the development of the AR-HUD. However, generating the augmentation in the AR-Creator was completely new territory.”
Spoelder is confident that the AR-HUD will change the way people are driving: “The quality of the human machine interface in the vehicle is fundamentally changing with the AR-HUD. The information appears where the driver intuitively looks first – in the direction of travel. Information can hardly be transmitted in a more ergonomic and intuitively comprehensible way. This augmented reality technology places Continental in a leading role for HUD development.”
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