The Augmented Reality Windshield and How We See the World

Enhancing engagement, or providing an excuse to retreat even further from it? JL

Ferris Jabr reports in the New York Times:

Why not turn that passive barrier into a dynamic canvas? Ordinary windows could be replaced with holographic glass or an advanced semitranslucent liquid-crystal display. They could anticipate our needs and instantaneously display details about attractions. The potential of the autonomous vehicle is to help us interact with our environment in ways never before possible. The temptation is to turn ever more inward, exchanging the physical world for yet another simulation.

For obvious reasons, our present-day cars are designed for keen observation of the outside world, offering a nearly panoramic view of the road and landscape through panels of glass. The parade of images flitting past a car’s windows can be exhilarating or can induce a kind of pleasurable trance. By virtue of being transparent and inert, however, windows are inherently limited. Although we have begun to augment the car’s field of vision with new layers of information — phones suction-cupped to the windshield, or GPS built into the dashboard — there is still so much useful knowledge just out of reach. Today’s windows allow you to scope out a parking spot or search for that tiny cafe with the faded sign, but they can’t help you find them. Nor can they show you exactly where that highway exit will lead or identify the odd building you just passed.

Tomorrow’s could. Unlike Google Glass — which awkwardly placed screens where they didn’t need to be — a car already requires a membrane between passengers and their environment. Why not turn that typically passive barrier into a dynamic canvas? Ordinary windows could be replaced with holographic glass or an advanced semitranslucent liquid-crystal display. They could anticipate our needs and instantaneously display weather forecasts, reviews of nearby restaurants and hotels, details about popular tourist attractions — and warnings about miserable tourist traps.

As the technology improves and people become more comfortable obscuring their surroundings, your windows could begin to overlay a vast digital diorama onto passing scenery. Passengers would no longer have to wonder about the identity of a landmark and scramble to look it up on their phones. Instead, the car itself, wired with artificial intelligence, plugged into sophisticated mapping technology and equipped with magic eyes, would instantaneously recognize, annotate and augment its surroundings. A mountain, desert or coastline could become an interactive infographic, peeling away the physical surface of the earth to reveal hidden layers of geology. A self-directed double-decker bus ambling through London could rearrange the city like a Lego set, refashioning streets and buildings to illuminate the capital’s rich history. Early television sets made the distant accessible; the self-driving car could reveal the invisible in the immediate.

As exciting as such possibilities are, recent history suggests plenty of reasons to temper our optimism. When windows double as screens, we will have the opportunity to gaze at the world anew through richly animated portals. Alternatively — and perhaps more realistically — we could end up staring into larger versions of our phones, distracting ourselves with email, mindless games and the infinite bazaar of the internet. The potential of the autonomous vehicle is to help us interact with our environment in ways never before possible. The temptation is to turn ever more inward, exchanging the physical world for yet another simulation.

Either way, self-driving cars with ubiquitous screens will inevitably bring all the familiar drawbacks of digital media onto the open road. Taxi TV in New York City is just a preview of the potential nightmare. What if the price for enchanted windows of the future is a nauseating kaleidoscope of advertisements, vapid movie reviews and contextless late-night jokes? Rather than learning about the hidden history of your surroundings, you may very well learn only about two-for-one cricket tacos in the food truck a lane over, homeowner’s insurance for the Anthropocene or the sale on microdrones at a nearby mall. Don’t want ads? No problem. You can upgrade to a premium account.