Imagine that instead of having a poorly rendered 3D map on your GPS you’re able to see the world as it exists with your GPS data overlay on your reality.
I call this augmented reality. The concept is that you see the world as it actually exists via a camera in the back of the GPS device. The arrows for directions appear to be directly on the road surface the way it’s done in most football games. In addition you can get point of interest information on buildings as you drive by.
Mac from petitinvention got me thinking about this concept with his own mobile internet device. While his concept is perhaps the longer term future I do think that GPS devices could deliver something along these lines in the next few years. Now that Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have driven fleets of cars around the country taking pictures of roads and landmarks with GPS information it’s only a matter of time untill the technology catches up. The nice thing is that you don’t even need high tech image-recognition for this to work. You just need precise triangulation of your GPS position and the road edges.
Tags: Display, GPS, Heads Up, Navigation
Perhaps you could use the window of the car as the visual HUD? I believe some BMW models have that, but instead of showing your speed, fuel etc, it could be used to display directions. It just feels wrong to use a camera to display the reality which you can already see through the glass, but I guess it would be much harder to display this stuff on the window.
This is already being developed. This year’s CeBIT had tons of similar solutions and I beleive we could see something coming out of it in a few years.
As said previously, it has been already developed, published and explored in research labs for a decade at least.. Indeed, it has just been recently gaining attention from the public due to the increase of capabilities of mobile technology.
For example, you can find more information about it from some projects conducted at the HIT Lab NZ:
http://www.hitlabnz.org
For this to work well, you need an accurate gps and when did you last here anyone talk of gps accuracy? Nobody seems to care. In our line of work gps accuracy is everything and we test new equipment all the time. We have found nothing that compares to using a Pharos SD GPS on a PDA, and the Pharos SD GPS is out of stock. There aren’t any phones or GPSs with SD slots anyway. But all new phones that we have tested have substantially inferior accuracy to that solution (which we found 5 years ago).
Does anyone know of anyone that is testing and reporting on GPS accuracy anywhere?
In March of this year (2010), Boeing launched the first IFF satellite. It is the first in the fleet of new GPS satellites that boast 3ft accuracy vs. the 15ft we currently have. I think <4 feet of resolution is sufficient for very precise application. Not only will the GPS have a better idea of when you've entered the intersection (the units now guess and err on the side of caution which can lead to instructions coming too late), but the GPS unit will actually know what lane of the highway you are traveling so that it can tell you if you should merge or stay in your current lane when exiting on a ramp with multiple lanes. This technology (give it 3 years to replace the current technology on mid- to high-range devices) will allow a slew of new AR applications. It will also allow for much better water and trail navigation where there is not a painted lane to keep you on track. I'm excited to see cell phone cameras combine with GPS to provide a richer, more informative navigation system. (and a wish congress would legislate the requirement to have a magnometer in every gps device so that it knows what direction you're facing, even when you're not moving (think pulling out of a driveway or standing up and spinning in place)