A new "enhanced vision system" from General Motors could help drivers by highlighting landmarks, obstacles and road edges on the windshield in real-time. Such a system can point out to drivers potential hazards, such as a running animal, even in foggy or dark conditions, GM says.

Head-up displays (HUDs) are already used to project some information--like a car's speed or directions--directly in front of the driver, through the windshield, or even through a side view mirror. These sorts of displays have started appearing in high-end cars, and typically work by projecting light to create an image on part of the windshield.

To turn the entire windshield into a transparent display, GM uses a special type of glass coated with red-emitting and blue-emitting phosphors--a clear synthetic material that glows when it is excited by ultraviolet light. The phosphor display, created by SuperImaging, is activated by tiny, ultraviolet lasers bouncing off mirrors bundled near the windshield. Three cameras track a driver's head and eyes to determine where she is looking.

"We definitely don't want the virtual image that's on the display to complete with the external world; we just want to augment it," says Thomas Seder, the lab group manager for the Human Machine Interface group at GM.

The new display, which so far has only been tested in simulations, wouldn't be incorporated into cars until 2018 at the earliest, says Seder. The team hopes to pair the technology with night vision and find a way to combine the work with other sensors in the car to keep costs down, he adds.

"I'd like to couple with other systems and not have it be a standalone. That will help cost reduce it dramatically," says Seder.

See how the system, which was developed with partners from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Southern California, works in the video below.

The demo consisted of a dashboard containing an Atom processor and wireless radios to communicate with devices, such as MP3 players, cell phones, or laptops, which might come into the car with passengers. In addition to talking to objects within the car, the built-in PC can talk to objects outside the vehicle, including other cars and even traffic signals, thanks to a clever approach developed by the researchers. Nguyen explains that it would be relatively inexpensive to add photodetectors to the headlights of cars so that they could "see" the brake lights of cars in front of them as well as LED-based traffic signals.

In Thursday's demonstration, Nguyen showed that when a traffic light or brake light fitted with a modulator--a device that flickers light to send a signal--sends a message, a photodetector in a car's headlight can pick up the signal and act accordingly.

So what does that mean? If you're quickly approaching an intersection where the light is red, or approaching a car with its brake lights on, a voice from the dashboard would warn you to slow down. And if you don't stop, says Nguyen, the car itself might automatically apply the brakes. He adds that other Intel research projects are investigating how to implement these sorts of technologies while considering human behavior. Not everyone will have the same level of tolerance for an automated (and omnipotent) backseat driver, he says.