You are driving your car in a busy street. You don’t want to loose your concentration for a while even. But in the meantime, you have some signals from one of your subsystems which you need to see immediately. And your smart car just pops up a quasi-transparent layer on part of your windshield so that you can read from the display without moving your eyes from your front! Sounds like a day in a future from the science fiction? Not anymore; with BMW, the future is now!
BMW brought in an innovative technology by projecting high quality image or display on the visor of its F1 driver Ralf Schumacher. The system was incorporated into the visor of the helmet and would allow unhindered vision even while showing some graphical information as a projection.
This was the first type of it in the automobile industries though the technology is in use by military avionics, where the helmet of the fighter’s pilot receives the projection. The next level of this technology is a projection on the cockpit glass of the aeroplane where the pilot has the opportunity to see a bigger projection and multifarious information. Following this same line of technical development, it’s not anymore a distant future when you will have a display on the windshield showing either the vital information like own speed, engine rpm, but also additional information like the display from your GPS navigator or a video conference window.
Though this on screen projection is meant to be a safety add-on, to enable a driver performing tasks deemed necessary even when driving; sceptical opinions suggest that the display might obstruct the vision and instead of becoming a safety utility may become a safety hazard. However, as experienced from the aviation industry and Formula One racers; the driver is supposed to become accustomed to the almost “transparent” extra layer in a corner of his screen and can take note of the information form the display without being distracted from driving safely.