Apple Patent Turns Car Windscreen into Giant Augmented Reality Screen | Hacker News Reader

Apple Patent Turns Car Windscreen into Giant Augmented Reality Screen

newsweek.com

31 pointsjpindar47 comments

I don't know what is necessarily novel in this. For example, I remember (but can't find) a feature for a high end car that showed IR camera display to highlight unseen deer on the road..

Anyway, I think this is a good feature for intermediate automated cars. There is a problem with keeping people interested enough to be ready to take over if there is a situation that the computer lacks the confidence to deal with. One application might be to turn the display into a game field. When there is traffic, you could be able to interact with the other cars on the road. When there isn't there could be simulations. That way, you are always looking forward and at least somewhat engaged.

As safety confidence drops, the system can highlight the area where the problem is developing, giving a subtle hint to get ready.

For later iterations, the controls could become more "game controller" like where the driver is choosing between different scenarios and the system figures out how to do it.

>For example, I remember (but can't find) a feature for a high end car that showed IR camera display to highlight unseen deer on the road.

IIRC that was Lincoln, or perhaps Cadillac. I remember the TV commercials from my early teens.

Cadillac had the first go in 2000. Mercedes and BMW have had night vision for little over a decade now while Audi and Lexus have more recently joined the fray, but all have had them out for at least one generation of vehicles.

> Another feature in the patent—titled Panicky Occupant Detection—would monitor drivers' stress levels by observing their eye movement, body posture, body temperature, eye blink rate, heart rate and body gestures. The HUD would then adjust which display elements are shown on the windscreen.

Or people driven nuts by their spouses in the other seat?

That’s the POD-2, Pesky Occupant Detection. If it detects difficult friends, spouses, or in-laws a hefty dose of Versed is delivered to the passenger. Relief for the driver within minutes guaranteed!

> The HUD would then adjust which display elements are shown on the windscreen.

Yeah, it wouldn't add to the already stressful situation if you suddenly couldn't find whatever you were looking for, not at all.

These dynamic adaptations to the GUI has always resulted in the worst UI ever. Consistency is paramount.

And people wonder why some of us just like editing text config files in vim...

Well vim is modal, so it's not exactly doing well in this regard!

I don't consider vim to be a culprit, you really can't update your key-bindings dynamically (in practice) to say more efficiently utlize the home row. It would be unusable and the UI would have no way to conway the new mappings.

Vim is still consistent, you have to mentally keep track of which mode you are in but that's second nature after you've groked it. Dynamic UI changes are not and always requires you to do one extra roundtrip and scan the UI for what options are currently available and adapt to it.

Knowledge that my car is monitoring my every twitch and heartbeat is more stressful than any traffic situation

Just one more place to expect ads being shoved in your face.

I'm not sure why this is downvoted. It's a real concern IMO. Want to use Waze on your Apple i-touch-touch windshield screen? Fair enough, but expect those "cheap gas station alert" pop-ups to persist there as well.

Because Apple doesn’t try to shove ads in your face (except in the App Store, which seems fair enough).

They don’t let you show ads on CarPlay (out for 3-4 years), why would this be any different?

They don't show ads yet. Once operating systems started integrating ads, I became increasingly cynical.

Ads are the current end game for anything with access to user eyeballs. Just give it a few years, until whatever devision needs some way to squeeze a little more juice out of their revenue projections

I highly doubt it in apples case. It would be a complete 180 for them. Android? Sure. But Apple has spent years reenforcing the message that they don’t monetize your data in the same way that android does.

>They don't show ads yet. Once operating systems started integrating ads

I've never seen integrated ads on any of my Macs during normal use outside a web browser, and in iOS specifically it's always been a thing, whether built-in to the OS or a third party library. But since including, what is it called now, AdKit? I haven't seen any unusual ads in the main UI other than in the usual use-cases in apps or the web browser.

> Apple doesn’t try to shove ads in your face (except in the App Store, which seems fair enough)

And how much of Apple's current behavior is simply a product of luxury they can afford just as long as they're in the money?

What behaviors will Apple exhibit when their demands begin to outstrip their resources? It's a very large for-profit corporation, don't be so myopic.

It’s a luxury brand. What would you expect, say, Louis Vitton to do in such a situation? Nothing. Any response (other than “no response”) would ruin their brand image.

Apple sells to people looking for a different approach.

This is fundemental, and doing it commands high margins.

Being successful is why they have the cash pile they do and get the fat margins.

One subtle artifact in all of that is Apple does not need volume, nor has to accomodate tons of hardware variants. Being whole "stack" in this sense means being able to ask for value added everywhere possible.

I suspect ADS in a car HUD will not be welcome, and could actually see ethical challenges. Incentives are high to get a thing like this right.

I will tell you all right now, for me? NO. Not one AD. Not while driving. It is not OK, nor worth it.

Bet a cookie that sentiment is not hard to find out there.

In any case, the luxury comes from doing the work. Apple is well differentiated in this way. They have no reason to change, and billions of reasons to continue.

The liabilities there are too great to be worth it.

Given that it's AR though, I expect existing billboards to be replaced with greenscreens and the windshield will augment your reality to display whatever some algorithm thinks you should see on it.

Unless the car is fully autonomous: then the liability is gone to the manufacturer of the autonomous system, so that you can enjoy your ads while being driven around.

So, AdBlock++?

uBlock Origin, with updated lists. That is, once the Windshield gets jailbroken.

Ads? That's not the driving tech in video. Porn is.

How?

The adage used to be that porn drove innovation. We need personal computers to watch...porn. We need faster internet to acquire...porn. We need higher-capacity hard drives and better compression algorithms to store...porn. We need robots with more humanoid and lifelike prosthetics...so we can fuck them.

Perhaps this was true in the 90s-00s, but I doubt it.

The state of VR is greatly ahead of where it was 20 years ago but still just a novelty in the context of porn. The current advances in ML, AI and whatever blockchain ends up being used for have little to nothing to do with porn itself (recommendation algorithms and chatbot/NLP tech have application but aren't drivers). Robotics is being advanced by far more productive applications like manufacturing and putting unskilled humans out of work.

We may eventually get to the point of autonomous sexbots that leverage all of these technologies, but it's surveillance tech and the monetization of voyeurism (for advertising) that's driving today's advances, not porn itself.

I agree with your conclusion (the current state of affairs), but one could argue that VR has developed less optimally than if you had the porn industry enthused with the prospects of being the first players getting to that market. But this is pure speculation.

Though that comment may be somewhat playful, the affirmation makes good biological sense if you consider that porn messes almost directly with one of our most basic instincts. And although you can argue that ads do the same, the thing is that on ads, if they’re regulated and suited to the broadest public consumption, the appeal to the basic instincts has to be much more subtle. That makes it is less direct and less capable than porn for driving the tech resources to its development. But the difference may not be as substantial as I imagine it to be.

Why did you misread this as a Google or Facebook patent?

I'd say that depends on the content. By default, Apple doesn't show you ads, only third parties do. At the same time, Apple isn't an Ad company, which is relevant when comparing Apple and their operating systems to other companies and their operating systems. Take Google for example, they exist because they are an Ad company, and perhaps more and more for their paid services, but mostly ads, driven by data they mine or otherwise collect. Apple doesn't base their business on that, and neither does most of Microsoft (but consider OneDrive, Bing, Office, Windows 10 etc.)

If my car wants to highlight the liquor store that sells my favorite beer at the best price or the hardware store that has the thing I was looking at on Amazon for a better price, etc, etc then it's fine by me. If it starts trying to highlight BS local singles in my area I'm gonna be amused but not pleased. Geographically relevant ads are usually higher quality (local businesses don't want to associate with scummy advertisers that make them look scummy) and less obnoxious than typical internet ads and you can only distract drivers so much before lawyers get involved so I don't think there well be as much abuse as we see with normal online ads.

Re: Just one more place to expect ads being shoved in your face.

Clippy: "It looks like you just crashed [due to distraction from Clippy ads]. Would you like a list of local accident attorneys?"

Better link: http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2018/08/apple-in...

As a driver, this could be nice.

As a PASSENGER, if this stuff moves around based on where the driver’s head is I would get motion sickness really fast.

Wear polarized sunglasses.

Light reflecting off of a windshield tends to polarize. If your glasses are 90° offset, you shouldn't see much.

That is not a solution.

Ugh this is going to end up like ford's patents where really simple things that every car should have can't be used in any cars because the law says so. We almost ended up with this happening to seat belts and that would have ruined cars.

Simple ideas that anyone could and has come up with should not be eligible for patents, I thought about this idea a decade ago and other people obviously thought about it long before me. Doesn't mean I should be able to stop everyone else doing it.

I almost forgot Apple was still working on cars..

>As for FaceTime, Apple hopes it can help drivers communicate visually while driving.

Does this seem like it could be a bad idea to anyone else? usually the whole point of facetime is that you are looking at the person (rather than the road) seems like it could lead to more accidents? I guess it's probably not a big deal, and way better than texting an driving.

I like the notion of deep-field AR along the lines of Hololens or Magic Leap being possible with a simple pair of passive 3D glasses. This opens a range of possibilities, such as a whole new kind of IRL Mario Kart. (However this design would need to be safety-focused in a way that few video games have ever had to, which would likely detract from that particular experience.)

But, as another user has pointed out, this would need to be optimized for the viewer's head placement, resulting in a terrible experience for passengers. So the default should be a basic HUD. Facetime will be fine with this. Maps will probably need multiple modes for different levels of immersion based on user preference.

Is that like a HUD in a fighter? Wouldn't that count for prior art?

No those are separate displays not built into the windshield/screen.

Personally this really shouldn't be patentable but mainly because it's basically a software patent. There's not really much there that's physical other than the display and the fact it interacts with 'sensors' the rest is just a piece of software.

HUDs in aircraft are still just a reflection off of a surface. There have already been cars with HUDs. Doing this with a single surface doesn't seem innovative to me, seems like a logical leap.

TL;DR; I think this patent will eventually be rebuked.

I hope I'm not the only one who's initial reaction was "What the hell is a windscreen?" I know windshield, not windscreen. They didn't say windshield in the article, I don't know if they are referring to the windshield or not.

The functionality isn't even the hard part, it's the mountain of legal issues you raise with distracted driving. I would assume the facetime calling would only be permitted when the car isn't moving.

I think windscreen/windshield is one of those bonnet/hood trans-Atlantic discrepancies that turn out to be synonyms.

With self driving cars somewhere in the forseeable future, I wonder if a system like seen in the movie "Daybreakers" is realistic. One where the windshields are blacked out, and video hud allows you to see outside. In that case the windshields could be replaced with a stronger material, and maybe car designs become even more aerodynamic. See also the airplanes that have no windows for passengers.

So Apple want to charge all futuristic AR car makers, because "Apple invented it"? The idea of AR on anything is known for a long time already. It's more of a typical future protection racket attempt through software patents and shouldn't be patentable.

OT: Wait, is Newsweek a British publication? Most vehicles don't have windscreens within the American meaning of that term.

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