Augmented Reality for Improving Passenger Safety, or Fully Autonomous Cars?

Are Fully Autonomous Cars the wave of the future? We've seen them in many Sci-Fi films and show, from KITT in the Knight Rider TV show

Total Recall (1990) with the robot Taxi driver

Minority Report

And let's not forget this Audi beauty from I, Robot

But before we give up the driver's seat, there are some interesting advances in Augmented Reality that are available today as built-in features or add-ons in some car designs, or as apps for your phone.

For example, Audi Pre Sense that identifies emergency braking situations, following a vehicle too closely, etc.

Or the Pre Collision System and Lane-Keep Assist features on the more affordable Toyota Prius

However, if you're not into buying a new car yet for any reason, you might want to check out iOnRoad. The App is free to download for iPhone and Android phones.

A quote from Wikipedia:
iOnRoad is a free augmented reality driving safety app.^[1] It received the International CES 2012 innovation award.^[2][3][4] The program uses the GPS feature, gyroscope and video camera stream of the native mobile device to monitor a vehicle’s position on the road, alerting drivers of lane departures and potential collisions with audio and visual cues.^[5][6] iOnRoad has been downloaded by over 500,000 people.

The application seems to use some nifty realtime image analysis on the video camera stream in combination with your GPS and accelerometers to determine the vehicle's speed.

The realtime stream processing is interesting and I'm quite impressed with its potential. I mean, cars on the road don't all look the same, and it takes quite a bit of an abstraction of the image in front of you to determine whether what you're looking at is a "car" versus other objects. And what about trucks of all sorts, or trailers that could be carried by cars or trucks, etc. Each of these may have very different "looks".

Some of the integrated safety systems (such as radar based ones) are also more impervious to varying weather conditions, and exposure sensitivity at night time.

However, as a start, it might be well worth it to at least try it out. If you buy the app with the windshield holder, the app will automatically detect that the phone is getting mounted on the windshield and would start monitoring. It can also work less intrusively in the background, so you only get to hear form it when you follow too closely. Watch though that you'd need to fiddle with it for a bit until you get your phone mounted at the right elevation and angle, because if the camera sees too much of the car hood, the app won't work.

Drive safe