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.

Yesterday, Panasonic sold its first 3-D HDTVs at Best Buy in New York. For about $3,000, you can get a 50-inch 3-D plasma TV, a 3-D Blu-ray player and one pair of 3-D glasses (additional ones are available for about $150). Just the day before, Samsung announced that it will be selling three versions of 3-D TVs within the month and Sony stated that it will roll out 3-D TVs this June in Japan.

Samsung's sets will range from $1,699 to $6,999 and it will offer more versions in the spring and summer (some versions are already offered in South Korea). To coincide with the release of its first 3DTVs, Sony plans to release 3-D gaming software, most likely for its Playstation 3 system.

3-D Home Theaters have been available from Mitsubishi since 2007, at prices ranging between $1,500 and $4,200. Mitsubishi has also recently demoed a Nvidia driver that converts PC games in 3-D on its screens.

With so many 3-D TVs on the way, viewers will need something to watch. Satellite TV service DirecTV confirmed that it will offer three 3-D channels in June, while sports network ESPN plans to broadcast the soccer World Cup in June on its new 3-D channel.

The research firm DisplaySearch predicts that 3-D TVs will grow from the 0.2 million units sold in 2009, to over 1.2 million units this year, to 64 million units by 2018, with revenues forecast to reach $22 billion dollars by then. Currently, 3-D TV sets require viewers to wear 3-D glasses, but at some point in the future, consumers may be able to watch 3-D TV glasses-free.

On Monday Nokia launched a new research center based on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. The company already operates research centers in ten other locations around the world.

During a press briefing, chief development officer Mary McDowell said that, given the current economic climate, the new center will not pursue big-sky research but will focus on technologies that can be brought to market in three-to-five years. Areas of particular focus will include user interfaces, cognitive radio (a way to enable wireless devices to more efficiently share airwaves), technologies targeted at emerging markets, and what the company calls "context modeling" (applications that rely on information from sensors and GPS).

At Monday's launch event, the company offered demos of some research projects already under development at its Palo Alto, CA outpost, including a phone playing a 3D movie. As Duncan Graham-Rowe reports today on our site, 3D displays are going mobile. In the Nokia prototype, the effect is created by projecting a different image to each eye and it requires specially-created content. Phones that contain two cameras could allow users to create their own 3D content, said Henry Tirri, worldwide head of Nokia Research Center.

Watching movies seems to be the only marketable application for non-holographic 3D displays so far. Last week at the Frontiers in Optics conference in San Jose, I attended a session where researchers lamented the inability of such displays to crack into the market. At that session, Gregg Favalora, the founder of now-folded Actuality Systems, said that his company should have focused on more gee-whiz, easier-to-market applications like displays for corporate lobbies. (Instead, they did the engineering first, coming up with some pretty amazing but expensive devices for projecting volumetric images of medical scans used to plan cancer radiation treatments.) Watching a 3D movie on your cell phone, or snapping 3D images on the fly, might offer just this gee-whiz factor.

Nokia researchers also showed a project based in Bangalore. The company supplies 65% of the mobile services in India, and most of these phones are limited to calls and text messages--they don't offer GPS or Internet access. Deepti Chafekar, a researcher based at the Palo Alto Research Center, said the company is testing a set of location-aware services that are based on text messaging. For example, a user can send a text asking how to get somewhere, and receive directions in the form of a text message. User location is determined by proximity to cell towers. Another service being tested in Bangalore lets users display their location to someone they're texting with.