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Continental Shows Its Augmented Reality Head-up Display for 2017

Head-up displays, or simply HUDs, have a pretty long history. They evolved from the old reflector sight used on pre-World War II fighter aircrafts to eliminate parallax for pilots needing to take aim at their targets. From that simple reticle, the technology continued to advance in aviation to indicate a lot more than a simple dot and it even found its way into cars in the last decade.
Continental augmented reality head-up display 8 photos
Photo: Continental
Continental new combiner head-up displayContinental new augmented reality head-up displayContinental new augmented reality head-up displayContinental new augmented reality head-up displayContinental new augmented reality head-up displayContinental new augmented reality head-up displayContinental new augmented reality head-up display
Many vehicles on the market now can be had with a head-up display that shows speed, current gear, rpms and even navigation instructions. But it seems that is not enough and soon our windshields will display even more stuff, through a feature called “augmented reality”. Continental recently showed their AR-HUD technology, which makes driving look more like a computer simulator.

Their Augmented Reality Head-up Display is made out of two systems. The standard one that shows basic information like speed and gear in the lower part of the windshield and the second one that projects additional information further ahead.

The system seamlessly blends the road scenery with arrows, lines and other shapes to show the driver other cars’ position and speed, lanes, distance to the car in front as well as paths to follow according to the destination entered on the sat-nav.

Sounds great for beginners, who are not accustomed to throw short glances at the physical instrument cluster, and even greater as Continental already signed a contract with an unnamed automaker to provide it with the new technology. Jaguar, is that you?

The only problem is that the whole system needs 13 liters of space inside the dashboard now. The engineers said to decrease it to 11 liters, but still it’s a lot when you think how many other things are stashed there.

In other news, Continental also created a new combiner HUD that is said to be more compact than what’s currently offered. The combiner HUD type is that one using a small piece of glass or plastic above the instrument cluster for the info to be displayed on, instead of the windshield itself, just like the one in the Mazda3.

The new combiner HUD requires just a bit more than half of the installation space required by the windshield projected ones. The system will be more suitable for compact cars, while the full windshield version will remain for mid-size and above higher end vehicles. The new combiner HUD is due to enter production next year.
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