Virtual Windshields: Merging Reality and Digital Content to Improve the Driving Experience

During recent years, the use of the automobile as the primary mode of transportation has been increasing and the driving task performed daily by millions of people has become an important part of daily life. Driving is both a physical and a mental skill and is a multi-sensory experience. Drivers greatly rely on their senses to provide them with information about their surroundings to guide them to accurately and safely perform the driving task. Despite the effectiveness of human senses, in a vehicular context they are all too often limited and obstructed by various elements which can lead to misinterpretations of particular situations by drivers. Such a flaw may have negative outcomes and potentially result in accidents. Today, road accidents constitute the eighth leading cause of death, representing the first leading cause of death in young people between the ages of 15 and 29. Vehicular safety has been actively explored in recent year and even before the appearance of motorized vehicles many devices had been developed and placed not only in vehicles, but also in the road environment as a means to regulate traffic, and to provide better awareness and increase road safety for all road users. The rapid growth of technology has propelled novel ways in which driver’s senses may be augmented. One such technology is that of Augmented Reality (AR) which offers the ability to provide drivers with a variety of information in an unobtrusive manner. Augmented Reality is starting to be widely explored in a vehicular context, mainly aimed at drivers, in providing them with different kinds of information which allows for more effective and safer driving. The enclosed aspect of a car, allied with the configuration of the controls and displays directed towards the driver, offer significant advantages for augmented reality systems when considering the amount of immersion it can provide to the user. The windshield itself may be seen as an augmented reality transparent canvas on which digital content may be super-imposed over the driving scenario. In addition, the inherent mobility and virtually unlimited power autonomy transform cars into perfect mobile computing platforms. However, automobiles currently present limited network connectivity and thus the created augmented objects are merely providing information captured by in-vehicle sensors, cameras, maps and other databases. A review of such systems currently available in vehicles has been conducted as part of this thesis, as well as a study of vehicular connectivity paradigms. By combining the new paradigm of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networking (VANET) with augmented reality human machine interfaces, we aim to show that it is possible to design novel cooperative Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), that base the creation of AR content on the information collected from neighbouring vehicles or roadside infrastructures. This digital content can then be super-imposed on a transparent windshield and create novel opportunities for the contextualized dissemination of digital content. Not only can the visual sense of the driver be explored through this AR paradigm, but also the auditory sense, creating acoustic digital content that can greatly improve the overall awareness of drivers. We implement some prototypes of both visual and acoustic AR systems, using not only a simulation-based platform but also using real vehicles and highly immersive AR equipment such