Tech

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Car infotainment systems are getting ever bigger, but a startup’s new prototype takes things further than even something like Ford’s pillar-to-pillar touchscreen — by turning your windshield into a full-color 3D heads-up display.

Distance Technologies, established by the co-founders of enterprise headset maker Varjo, showed off its design last week at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, California.

CEO Urho Konttori was slightly cagey about the precise mechanics in an interview with my colleague Sean Hollister, but overall, the effect is a semi-transparent 3D display that covers the driver’s half of a normal-sized windshield.

Vehicle makers can integrate voice and gesture controls, and the prototype is hooked up to an Ultraleap hand tracker, so you can do things like hit a notification to accept a phone call without looking away from the road.

The full-color projection can display videos, which means features that are currently relegated to cars’ infotainment screens — like the feed from a rear-facing camera — could sit on one side of the windshield instead.

I have a slightly unusual vision situation — one of my eyes is a little nearsighted, and I don’t wear glasses — and while this rarely causes problems in real-life driving or normal AR headsets, it could account for parts of my experience.

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