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A (likely terrible) idea that just occurred to me-

How cool would it be to use a VR headset to help you navigate a vehicle? Yes, I mean to say wearing this while driving essentially.

Given a fast/good enough sensor/input system, you could scan your environment, know the dimensions of your vehicle (I'm mainly thinking boats and huge trucks here) and be able to "see through" massive blind spots on your vehicle to enable for tighter maneuvering.

Imagine a boat. Sometimes with a large enough boat it can be hard to see all around it. And frankly, its almost impossible to see under it. But given depth finding/scanning and sensors, you could make it so you could see the virtual hull of the boat and anything under the water, making navigating through areas with dangerous stumps or other things under the water much easier.

Anyway, this is kinda silly... but neat to think about. Also, ordered one :)




My understanding is that this "see through the vehicle" capability is built into at least some helmet-HUD/Helicopter combinations that the military has.

If it suffices for an attack helicopter, I'd say that the idea probably has serious potential for automobiles as well. I wouldn't expect to see it come to standard consumer cars yet, but for commercial drivers (particularly truck drivers who have massive blindspots) this could be invaluable. Imagine being able to see through the back of your box truck while backing up!


Yep, that's pretty much what I'm thinking. It started all with thinking how terrible of an idea it would be to wear this while motorcycling...

Someone at Google with access to one of the self driving cars should see what this would 'look like' from a passenger perspective with the data.


Feasible to cross dev with glass? Hmmm... I think I have a new project to work on!


I've joked that the ultimate tech hipsters need to use the Rift + Glass at the same time to look at a virtual Pebble watch on their arm...


Only if they can get the code for that efficient enough to run on the actual Pebble on their arm.


what purpose does Glass serve?


So you can see your tweets ;)


It's so other people can watch you seeing your tweets without being able to actually see your tweets.


The F-35 has six cameras embedded in the aircraft which project images inside the helmet, literally allowing the pilot to look through the airframe.

https://www.f35.com/about/capabilities/helmet


Maybe Erlang will finally get more popular.


I want to be able to see through other people's vehicles.


"FPV Flying" (First Person Video) of an R/C plane or quadcopter is quite similar, although obviously you're not in said vehicle.

The challenges there are mostly around downlink and latency, with analog video being the standard for its favorable latency and signal fade characteristics.

Many flyers do add a few more channels to their existing radio control systems in order to use camera gimbals with head tracking to allow the true "first person" experience you suggest.

Obviously for a real vehicle something like modern in-dash parking systems using stitched camera views to build an immersive environment would be more practical than a gimbal, although software latency is occasionally harder to control than that of hardware.


Actually this is a different but related area that Steve Mann calls mediated reality. It's essentially a level beyond AR by not only augmenting what you see but manipulating what you see (improved human vision is an example).

Meta is trying to achieve this through their AR glasses, which Steve Mann is part of.


I have had this exact thought for a while - use a bunch of cameras to compose a virtual third-person perspective of your car.

No more blindspots.

As it stands our local CubeSat team apparently want to try high-bandwidth radio - I'm suddenly on that side as long as we include a pair of stereoscopic cameras.


I've been wanting that for months.

I would put one camera in each of the lights, so I would have front and rear stereo vision.

The top of the screen would be forward, and the lower part, or a small window could be towards the back.

Easy parking!




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