See where you are driving from a vantage point outside your car
November 18th, 2008
Fujitsu Laboratories has developed a system which allows real time views of a vehicle and its surroundings from a virtual view point.
The system combines the images of four cameras mounted on each side of the vehicle into a panoramic view.
What amazes me, is that the view point can be located outside of the car, for example, from a vantage point slightly above the vehicle. This way, the driver gets a very good impression of the relative position of his/her car within its surroundings.
I don’t know what the limitations of this system are, for example what do we still see if an object is very close to one of the cameras obscuring its field of view? In any way, this system appears to be a very ingenious usability improvement over the mirrors of a car – the view is not reflected (left stays on the left, and right stays on the right), and objects do not appear to be further away than they actually are.
November 26th, 2008 at 11:54 am
Very pretty. I wish my new car could do *that*.