Should we let cars use the road as a projection screen? | Hacker News Reader

Should we let cars use the road as a projection screen?

autocar.co.uk

77 pointsclouddrover191 comments

Nice.

So we have some cars that rely on visual information for self-driving.

And we have some cars that can project onto the landscape, modifying visual information.

What could go wrong!

I only have a Volvo, in the UK, and it has one of those systems that tell you the last road sign that it has seen. That information then can optionally control warnings, speed limiter, etc. I typically do use the speed limiter, it works well... until I was behind a car that had a 20mph bumper sticker on the back. Then my car kept insisting that 20mph was the speed limit. I was on a motorway.

I also think of that Tesla stop light truck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ch7CJEQ2kz0 , and this https://uk.motor1.com/news/449020/video-tesla-model-3-traffi... , and this https://techxplore.com/news/2020-02-road-self-driving-car-hi...

Plot for a future novel: Project light onto surfaces from a moving vehicle to make another car behave in a way that kills the occupants. No evidence can be found at the scene as to why the car killed the occupants.

I am actually slightly surprised that road signs haven't been updated to include something like a "barcode" or similar that would make it very easy for the machine to identify what sign it is. You could "paint" over the entire sign with a variation in the infra-red reflectivity with a QR code, for example.

Then the computer would be better at recognizing a sign than a human.

Back in the late 2000’s I wanted to start a company that broadcasted the current speed limit near signs. Like a BT beacon, sorta, but obvs not BT. It turns out this requires too much coordination. Specifying a protocol, getting manufacturers to build it in, lawmakers to pay for it, sign makers to embed it, etc.

The tech is the easy part.

Isn't this solved by GPS and maps with speed limit data? Google maps gives me nonsense speed limits in a couple of places but mostly correct.

No, because the lower speed limits posted on flashing signs for construction are an important local case.

In my experience, Google just thinks those are traffic jams. I've seen Maps 'know' about road construction speed limits, but it isn't usual.

Good point. Also, M25 (London orbital motorway) has large sections with variable speed limit. Google maps navigation just doesn't show a limit for those areas, since it does not have timely data.

Also the 20mph boroughs really confuse the systems (cars and satnav), since they very often say 30 in 20 and also 20 in a 30. The various limits are, admittedly, not well signed, and I suspect that's deliberate to keep drivers cautious.

One problem is "map matching". That is, given your lat/lng (or, more realistically, a time-series of lat/lngs) and a map, figure out which road you're on.

The thing is that most consumer devices with GPS (like phones and even standalone GPS navigators) have a lot of internal "magic" to hide the raw noise in location fixes from the GPS signal.

For example, certain Garmin devices (intended to be used off road) will snap your location to an Interstate if you are going more than 55 mph and heading roughly in the direction of the road (which is evident when you run into traffic and your location keeps switching between the frontage road and expressway--the error distribution of the noise doesn't have mean=0!).

Out of curiosity, how did the tech deal with things like frontage roads that have much lower speed limits than the highway right next to them.

Basically, they haven't, or at least they hadn't 4 years ago when the car I have with it was made.

Diving along a free flowing 50 and having it decide it's now a 30 because it saw a sideroad and drop a gear is semi-regular. The second most dangerous thing it does after having a touchscreen.

It also manages to read 45 sometimes but I have literally never seen a 45 sign.

Radio waves can be directional. So they were pointed at the road they influenced, not the highway.

If embedded in the sign, what if the sign itself is rotated or damaged in some way?

Our prototype just screwed onto the sign post and could be aimed that way. We never added it to the prototype, but having an accelerometer added to detect movement and shutting down/calling home would help with damage or vandalism.

This would probably be easy to exploit. Someone could drop a bunch of random invisible stop signs.

to be fair someone could also go toss a steel bar on some railroad tracks or drop rocks from the top of a highway overpass.

Right, but that's rather obvious.

It's true that people aren't often looking for fatal pranks, but you could do more benign like try to get people pulled over by causing them to speed unknowingly.

Someone could really just weld a steel bar onto a railroad track out in the wilderness and derail a train??

Yes? No welding required, just a few thumbscrews, if you use one of these:

https://westernsafety.com/nolan-portable-derail-pd-2/

On sale now! Or pick this one for bigger and faster trains:

https://www.aldonco.com/store/c/127-SaberTooth-Portable-Dera...

There are lots of tools, weapons, chemicals, and other things that a person could do that would be bad. It doesn't take much creativity, just a callous disregard for other people. But in contrast to the fearmongering and crime you'll see in the media, consider it a bit of good news that in spite of how incredibly easy it is to intentionally cause harm to someone else, billions and billions of people choose not to do that every single hour of every single day.

I mean, you now have told a lot of people that you can just get a tool to derail a train easily, that I'd guess most (I didn't) don't even know it exists.

I think that's GP's point: derailing a train is just a search engine away, and that's only scary when we think about it, which we almost never do.

Which in turn is because our emotions around people setting out to do that, are calibrated around the fact that it basically doesn't happen outside of war conditions.

I googled how to do it just for lulz and got youtube video with someone showing one... and some russian/ukrainian looking name in comments asking about it and asking where to get one, from like a month ago

https://www.kyivpost.com/russias-war/anti-putin-russian-rebe...

I wonder whether it's related. Probably not but train derailments are weirdly relevant to current world state...

But back to the topic... I don't think anything should be censored and am of opinion freedom of speech just need to be taken wholecloth, good with the bad, but you gotta wonder how much easier it is now.

AFAIK, at least in Russia there are signaling systems that will interpret a metal object connecting the rails as "another train is on the track" and inform the train driver.

Not sure whether those systems are also installed in the wilderness though. But it seems kinda likely that anybody thinking "I should derail a train for fun" might not bother driving into the wilderness when there's an alluring, convenient, seemingly unobserved stretch of the railway available nearby.

Edit: another thing that comes to mind is that you'd also have to find a low-visibility part of the railway, even in the wilderness — because otherwise the driver will just notice the obstacle and stop the train.

You don’t even need to weld it, you just need to leave it somewhere in the way and striking it at sufficient speed will result it in bludgeoning through a car or worse.

An improperly stored rail from a maintenance project derailed a NYC subway train in 2017: https://apnews.com/article/a6a01e5928f9478bab0d33f03260870e

Yes. Railroad tracks in the middle of nowhere are usually freely accessible. Why bother putting a fence if no one's around? Even at railroad crossings in cities, one could cause a some collateral damage by welding it right next to the crossing.

Its hard to derail a train.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=agznZBiK_Bs

Are you genuinely asking about the feasibility? If so, then: yes.

Tag the coded signs on a GPS map. If the detected "sign" is not on the GPS map the system can label it as "probably malicious".

Then why use the signs at all rather than just use this gps based road rule database

Because not all cars are self-driving or have the ability to access this hypothetical database. That will remain the case for likely the next 30 or more years.

Right, but the cars that are scanning signs and will have the ability to read said code are the ones being suggested that they should consult this database to avoid errors. If they're consulting it to avoid errors, they could just use it directly

Now you have two sources of truth for autonomous and non-autonomous cars. You end up with two groups playing the same game by different rules on the same board simultaneously.

Whether or not that's a problem in practice is not clear to me. Among others, taxis, construction vehicles, emergency vehicles, garbage and delivery trucks, municipal busses, school buses, bicycles, motorcycles, and vehicles in funeral processions all play by different rules than the average motorist.

This mostly doesn't cause disasters. Of course they're visibly different for the most part and make up a comparatively small percentage of traffic.

Ride hailing vehicles might be an interesting point of comparison: they're visibly similar to normal vehicles, comparatively common, and play by something resembling taxi rules.

honestly if we're going this far we may as well embed a speed system in the road itself and have the signs for redundancy.

I can see potential problems with temporary signs, such as those put up for road works, around accidents or for police enforcement.

Plenty of places have no reliable GPS reception.

That's why we need to sign the signs.

And use a blockchain to track every interaction between passing cars and the sign. Which makes speeding tickets all that easier.

https://xkcd.com/1958/

Signs are already reflective and pretty standardized. I don't think machine-readable codes are really necessary for this.

One advantage of something machine-readable, like a QR code, would be to incorporate additional information (more than could be easily consumed by a human).

For example, a speed limit sign could include the name of the road it controls, which would help reduce instances of cars suddenly slowing to 35 mph on the freeway when passing a sign on the frontage road.

It might also be useful for cases of (this is US-centric) yellow "advisory" speeds posted for, e.g., sharp curves. The machine-readable aspect might indicate how long the advisory speed applies (next 1000 ft) and why (sharp curve, hidden intersection, etc.)

If you just want to feed computers just put a database with every sign location and data.

That way even faking or destroying sign would be ineffective.

Would have to be updated during temporary situations (roadwork etc) tho

> That way even faking or destroying sign would be ineffective

In theory you could add an HMAC (or similar) signature to the QR code. It would be bigger, but if cars maintained a DB of state DOT public keys, you could mitigate this somewhat.

Then you’d also have to worry about duplicate codes, but at least they wouldn’t be “fake”. Maybe even add lat/long coordinates to the code… again, more data, more pixels required, but it would make sure the signs are roughly in the right place. Which doesn’t seem all that feasible to require construction crews to put the right sign in the right place.

Logistically this doesn’t seem all that promising.

Just give the road crew a phone app that can read the sign.

Given the phone's camera, compass and GPS, validating that the sign has been installed as specified (location, facing direction) is almost trivial.

We can barely just keep a road painted. There’s no budget for wholesale replacement of signs, which often have replacement spans in terms of decades.

Or they could have something like an IR beacon, that way cars can recognize them without relying on computer vision and nothing that looks like a road sign can confuse the system.

They have specific shapes and colors, which probably work the same way

How about blinding the (meat) driver with a low-powered laser? If you want to murder someone, there are many options.

I wouldn't bet on "no evidence" for the autonomous vehicle. It may record telemetry and video.

> It may record telemetry and video.

For the novel, probably neither of the above is recorded in high enough resolution.

Thinking of subliminal messages inserted into old movies here, just flashing something up for a hundredth of a second, doing it enough that a system detects something... but not enough that video filmed at 30fps really shows it, and that telemetry doesn't really capture it.

All the telemetry would show is "car thought X", and the video would appear to be clean. What isn't known from is "why" car thought something.

We have systems log stuff when there's less at stake. You'd have to really go out of your way to make this an unsolvable mystery murder.

That's a shame, I was thinking a modern Crow Road (Iain Banks) with it being an accident that only later you pieced together that a person was in fact a suspect because they'd had these skills and could've done this far out thing.

Old movies are projected at 24fps so subliminal messages like you mention would be noticeable from a 30fps camera.

Most interesting to think about are the stickers[1] that look random but actually trigger some kind of adversarial behaviour, a bit like how tiny human-imperceptible changes to an image can completely flip an image categorisation network's guess.

Perhaps most fun to think about in a Dan Brown-style NSA capabilities combined with Peter Watts' Blindsight's near-total-imformation perceptual-cognitive shenanigans kind of way.

[1]: https://medium.com/self-driving-cars/adversarial-traffic-sig...

Add the "autonomous car trapped by a circle of salt" to your repertoire if you haven't seen it already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thuN2HD6m2s

Except in the self driving computer's recordings of its inputs...

First, display an uproad pattern crafted to cause a buffer overflow. 0wn the autpilot, trash recording. Bonus points for taking over the entertainment system, cueing Death Grips "Guillotine" at max volume as the car leaves the road.

Humans also rely on visual information for driving and can easily be tricked. For instance, I don't think there is any security mechanism to prevent the placement of a battery powered green light on top of a red traffic light. In that case, an autonomous car's logs could actually help in discovering the tampering.

No, but the reason there are three (at least) lights is that the designers were well aware that colorblindness exists and the position of the light is also significant.

It's still kinda shit design to be honest.

Could have both color and shape. Make red hexagon, yellow square for example. or really any recognizable shape

I'm sure that manufacturability is a concern.

I'm sure it's no harder than making one in shape of arrow lmao

Interfering with a traffic signal is a crime in many jurisdictions.

> Plot for a future novel: Project light onto surfaces from a moving vehicle to make another car behave in a way that kills the occupants. No evidence can be found at the scene as to why the car killed the occupants.

Aside, well, the video the car recorded...

Autonomous Trap 001 is another: https://jamesbridle.com/works/autonomous-trap-001

I was actually on a 40mph road earlier today when I passed a side street with a 20mph sign that had been rotated to face the main road. My car was then insisting it was 20 for the rest of the road.

>Plot for a future novel: Project light onto surfaces from a moving vehicle to make another car behave in a way that kills the occupants. No evidence can be found at the scene as to why the car killed the occupants.

Problem with this is that self-driving cars like teslas will probably have cameras all over them

We are lucky that most people aren’t murderers: https://xkcd.com/1958/

Why? There are more reliable means of conveying information. Just because someone figured out they can do this doesn’t mean it is a good idea. The road in front of the driver is an area where the drivers focus should be solely dedicated to being aware of their surroundings. Projecting other symbols only clutters the information that the brain has to process. Status indicators work better in dedicated spaces to reduce cognitive load.

I could see projecting information that's useful to other drivers and pedestrians.

A rectangle indicating your stopping distance would be useful for cars intending to merge in.

A turn signal that is projected forward would tell people entering a cross-walk "there is a car trying to turn across this, watch out for them and make eye-contact".

A rear-projection rectangle would indicate a car is in reverse and may back up without seeing you.

The problem with all of these, and any other information is that they really only work at night, so...

I partially agree. I think this system is useful, but only for very simple spatial data. Having the car project a line one car length ahead and flashing bars synced with the indicators would be a major improvement over a standard unagumented view; however once you start trying to be fancy with symbols, letters, and numbers I feel any improvement in spatial awareness would be canceled out by the extra cognitive power needed to parse those symbols combined with the extreme clutter created by every other car on the road doing the same thing

Perhaps it should project a yield to pedestrians symbol warning the driver that there is a pedestrian in the crosswalk

Could just broadcast that info to cars around, ADS-B-style, then put it on HUD. Probably pretty hard to make it secure tho

I'd love to see info "the car in front of me will be taking right soon, or exact speed just displayed via HUD on top of the car.

> A rectangle indicating your stopping distance would be useful for cars intending to merge in.

> The problem with all of these, and any other information is that they really only work at night, so...

Nah, the real problem in my experience is people don't care. It's rare for people to even give me half of the distance they should when they merge. The full distance? That would be a miracle. It's hard for me to give the full distance. People just start passing me on my right even when I have my signal on.

I was initially very much against the idea, but this comment kinda put me in a 'maybe not a bad idea' camp. Naturally, the stuff will soon be hacked to project all sorts of other things, but that is, for better or worse, standard human behavior.

Does anyone know why we don't use audio for this sort of thing? Do we? I might have just missed it, not a driver.

I am aware of navigation/GPS of course but I mean for these sort of snippets of road info. The only non-GPS audio info I've heard is the bleeps in some cars that say there's a speed camera coming up.

Car: "40"

Brain: Aight speed limit is 40 now.

Car: "Give way"

Brain: I need to yield at the next junction.

It could even auto-pause if you're applying brakes or indicating / turning the wheel to avoid distracting you.

I know (or at least media has told me) that airplanes do use audio for this sort of info, wondering why it never made it to cars.

E: lol doubt I'll get a response, for some reason this post went from #2 to like #50

Not quite the same thing, but some cars did talk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3EuP7vZRSo

>the door…is ajar

Many cars are well-proofed against outside noise (like the Infiniti I used to drive.)

I imagine it using the speakers already inside your car. I'm not sure what you mean sorry.

because no one wants to take liability for an error

That would be one hell of a projection if it is visible to where I'm looking in the road. I'm not looking at the road immediately in front of me. I'm looking well ahead just as taught while learning to drive.

The proper look ahead distance varies based upon speed. When performing low speed maneuvers, a driver will need to look at the area immediately in front of their vehicle.

Projecting map info on the road means the driver has to look at the map screen less, which increases the focus on the road ahead.

Why on earth would you project this onto the actual road instead of just some HUD for the driver?

This whole thing seems like an absolutely insane idea to me from the get-go but the comments in here seem to really like the idea. I can't think of anything worse than light-projection systems from cars onto the real world for almost anything.

The only one I'm onboard with is something more visually indicating that a car is backing up. Plenty of vehicles have audio cues so a visual one makes sense to me.

But ideas that cars should project a warning to pedestrians that a car is going to turn blows my mind. How about you warn the operator that they might kill someone?

Cars already have mandatory lighted equipment to warn that they are going to turn, but too many operators seem to forget how that's supposed to work. I can't imagine how drivers are going to figure out how to communicate more complicated information if they can't remember how to use a little lever.

This isnt for the driver of the projecting vehicle, it is for everyone else around them.

And as many wrecks I have seen involving idiots invading safe stopping distances, this is a good idea, if they could make it work well in daytime.

Yeah a block of light in front of the car which overlaps with the lane merge projection from grandpa who left his blinker on conflicting with someone's navigation projection who needs to be in the right lane yesterday conflicting with someone's broken projection for pedestrians on a stroad sounds like a fucking hellscape.

People can't use blinkers correctly or keep their headlights and tailights in working order. I'm sure expensive light projections that link with software and a onboard computer that was out of date the day it was made is going to work splendidly.

>involving idiots invading safe stopping distances

What makes you think this will stop them?

Do you really think those idiots will pay even the slightest bit of attention to that stuff?

Personally, this looks like it will just add additional visual pollution to an already visually polluted landscape.

Assuming that the vehicle has empty road in front of them, at night, with sufficient contrast.

Many people drive vehicles during the day, on a road with other vehicles, or other competing lighting sources.

What is better is an indication system that works in all conditions, rather than requiring the driver to look different places under different scenarios.

Indicator lamps placed high upon a dashboard work in 100% of driving conditions and also allows the driver to remain looking in the correct direction.

The only thing they lack is marketing gee-whiz favor.

HUDs already exist in cars to do something very similar without potentially confusing symbols that others will see.

But other drivers can see it as well. It could easily draw their attention and thus make them more distracted.

Cars aren’t always alone on rural roads at night like the pics in the article.

Why not use a heads-up display on the windscreen? Some automakers already do this and it should avoid most of the concerns around projecting outside the vehicle.

Use a HUD.

I had a 90s Cadillac that had a FLIR HUD display. It was a little gimmicky but pretty cool and better than polluting the surroundings.

My Subaru has a very basic hud that I don’t think is distracting at all.

I don't understand how they call a head-up display a premium feature and then continue to describe matrix-led-projection headlights that are only on the high end models of premium German brands.

Head-up displays are available in a relatively mid-range BMW 3 series from over 10 years ago. It's an option you have to pay for, but so will these lights be.

Yeah heads up displays have to be at least an order of magnitude cheaper to produce, if not more.

1.3 million micro-mirrors per headlight :D God forbids we (Germany) just build good cars that get you from A to B.

That may sound weird, but it's actually off-the-shelf tech for a couple of decades now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Light_Processing It's already the most common projector technology, not something new they're developing just for this.

1.3 million mirrors is actually low-resolution by modern standards.

DLP TV mirror chip from 15-20 years ago had 2M mirrors.[1]

[1] https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/dlp1.htm

Depends on the system. The older ones that are still most common are just screens facing up in the dash that reflect off the windshield. They are also nearly 100% blocked during the day for anyone wearing polarized sunglasses, which limits their usefulness. Newer HUDs use lasers and work with polarized glasses, but of course they are a more complicated, expensive technology.

I’m not saying HUDs are great, I’m saying they’re relatively simple compared to this tech.

Yes and no. I believe this technology is an extension of selective darkening headlights.

Essentially, a camera system can detect surrounding vehicles and selectively darken the lighting around them. It means you could effectively always run your high-beams since the vehicles around you won't be blinded.

That’s a much better use of this technology, because it actually exhibits better performance than the technology it replaces.

'79 Lincoln TownCar did that with a single photocell, worked about 80% of the time. The tech is there and it's not expensive and I'd say could easily be improved with multiple low cost sensors.

The selective dimming they're referring to is variable in beam pattern, rather than the boolean high/low beam pattern of traditional vehicles.

Head-up displays are available in a relatively mid-range BMW 3 series from over 10 years ago.

Heads-up displays were available in cars at least as far back as the 1990's. Perhaps earlier.

These days, you can get an app for your smartphone that doe the same thing. You just velcro the phone to your dashboard under the windshield and the backwards HUD is reflected in the glass.

I don't think we should allow half the headlights that are currently in circulation. Once we get height and brightness levels under control, we can talk about extras.

In my experience, factory-installed headlights are rarely problematic. The primary offenders here seem to be after-market headlight additions. People purchase and install whatever their local auto parts store has that is bigger and brighter, and rarely take the time to properly align the headlights after the upgrade. This results in light being thrown much farther and wider than it ought to be.

I hate calling for crackdowns on petty issues from police types, but this is one of those areas that I would love to see.

Around here essentially all car lights are regulated. This mostly helps with people installing such crap.

Though I once discovered the inverse issue at the rear end of the car in front of me: Whoever thought a brake light should be a faint, red glimmer in completely black-tinted plastic (that's impossible to see from a few metres on a cloudy day) is either bonkers or pretty smart: I bet people actually buying these regularly need new ones.

Especially considering that with many modern cars, standing behind them at a traffic light and basking in the red brake lights feels like going to an adult club.

(Luckily I have radar with emergency brake assist, so except for the sound of me cursing to myself not a lot happened on the occasion).

that used to be true, but not anymore. many stock LEDs are bonkers bright

Another one is putting bulbs intended for projectors into a reflector setup without doing a projector retrofit.

> Touchscreens were intended to reduce the level of distraction but have proven controversial...

Had to laugh at this. I've never heard of the concept that touch screens were intended to reduce distractions. If that was the intent, I think it has failed catastrophically.

If it can be abused, it will be abused.

All it takes is one TikTok video of someone projecting their rap video on the road, and the streets will be awash with them.

Or better yet — Coca Cola delivery trucks projecting Coca Cola ads on the streets in front of them, and behind.

Or supermarket delivery cars projecting the latest specials on the streets for everyone to see.

Or road-spam-as-a-service, where you can rent a car to project your ads on the streets.

Combine it with a little bit of "AI:" Car sees someone walking their dog on the sidewalk, and projects ads for dog food at their feet.

Welcome to the dystopia.

You forgot the step where the Karens get to screechin' and the legislators get to legislatin' and we wind up with some knee jerk laws that don't really prevent the bad but curtails any development of the good.

> Touchscreens were intended to reduce the level of distraction

Uhm, what???

Yeah nothing is more annoying than touch screen inputs while driving. Even my porsche has an obvious input lag and the touch screen is rather low quality. German cars aren't particularly great when it comes to electronics let alone touch screens.

Even without input lag, having to look at a screen to press a button is much more distracting than a physical button that can be found without looking.

For a while now I think big trusks should project (via laser scanner maybe) a large keep-out zone in front of them. My impression is part of the reason those trucks drive so much slower is their need to maintain a safe following distance, combined with cars that pass them cutting into that area. If we'd stop violating their safe-following zone they could drive faster and not slow overall traffic so much. This is not considering the speed limit often being lower for them.

I for one can't wait to have direction arrows burned into my retinas by all the half wrecked and lifted vehicles that today do so with plain ol boring shapeless white light.

Isn't there a an odd effect where people are drawn towards what they're looking at while in motion?

I'm not sure I'd be a fan of plopping something unusual on the road in front of me if there's other lanes. I'm picturing some random rubbernecker sending me flying off the road because my car decided to project a raincloud in front of me.

E: target fixation is the term I was after

Target fixation is apparently how many motorcyclists crash. They see the tree and then ride directly into it. The first thing they teach a rider is looking where you need to go. It doesn't come naturally at first, because it often means you're not looking in front of the bike, and have to trust physics will do its thing. That body-bike connection needs to develop over time and become instinctual, the mind needs to be taking out of the equation. It really takes time. That's why it's often a horrible idea to start learning to ride well into adulthood, it's harder to learn these embodied habits.

Depends somewhat on the bike, but yah; and personally I prefer a bike that just goes where I look.

Somewhat related, CitiBike trialed a setup that projected a bike symbol ahead of the bike. It wasn’t rolled out widely, but I remember thinking that it was a good system on the few occasions I happened to get one of the pilot bikes.

https://www.6sqft.com/citi-bike-to-add-laserlight-projection...

If I had to guess, this probably drew a lot of attention to the moving symbol projected on the road and away from the actual cyclist.

...now if they could equip the bikes with cameras to issue tickets to all the people who park in our bike lanes, THAT would be cool.

The TfL hire bikes in London (Boris Bikes) have this. They don't seem great, it's just some faint green laser lines on the floor that don't resemble a bike rather than what you see in those photos. If anything they're more confusing for other road users.

Seems as far as an ambient computing approach, heads-up displays (or in the future, google-glass type interfaces) make more sense cause you can update the visuals easily

If you're just projecting onto surfaces seems like it will be slow and complicated to figure out what to project where

Plus I'm not sure it's even the best approach for the user. Like the Terminator in the movies had little bits of info overlayed on what he saw in his visual signals .. if this info was projected onto floors, walls, roads it would be confusing

Umm. No?

BMW's heads-up display shows an important example: Reflect it from your front window, do not litter streets.

Why can't a simple HUD work for this? I know saab and others had HUD's for navigation over a decade ago.

Just one data point from Germany: The legal situation currently makes it illegal to use arbitrary lightning signals in motorized traffic. This has many clear reasons, such as reducing stress and distraction and reserving blue warning lights to emergency vehicles, for instance.

Given how traditional and cautious Germany is when it comes to new technology, I could imagine that projecting cars have a long way until getting recognized. On the other hand, Germany thinks of itself as a automotive country. Car manufactures have a lot of influence in politics.

No. It's a shared space.

Gonna be great once the advertising industry finds out about this.

There are already too many problems with cars using roads as cars. Cars have monopolized public space in an unprecedented way that needs to be vastly scaled back.

This article makes claims without any evidence. I assume they are just repeating marketing copy from Ford et al. In what world would projected symbols from passing cars help pedestrians? Turn signals maybe but the given example of warning surrounding pedestrians about slippery surfaces is laughable.

And then there’s this line: “Touchscreens were intended to reduce the level of distraction”. If anyone actually ever said that, then they were just lying.

No. The correct answer is No.

I've asked this around a few times and I don't if it's completely dumb or somewhat viable.

Why can't we put rails on top of (some parts of) freeways and adapt our cars to work somewhat like railways? Call it "smart freeways" to sell it to general public.

When you merge on to the freeway, you "hook in", and the car starts to control itself. You tell it where to exit, and it takes care of merges, changes lanes, exiting, rerouting due to unforeseen obstacles, etc.

Seems like it could end up with the benefits of self driving cars but with training wheels and utilizing existing tech. Cars could easily signal lane changes, merges, and generally communicate with other cars to make things flow evenly and allow vehicles to move around. You would also avoid the "last mile" issue of getting you from the freeway to the destination-that would still be up to the driver

Actual metal rails aren't viable for a large number of factors. The least of which is maintenance due to big trucks damaging continuously degrading road around them. You'd be better off putting magnets in the road and have equipment in cars to follow them.

Even then, you're no better off than existing self-driving because you have to deal with every other car on the road that doesn't support "rails".

Ah, yes I forgot to mention that part of the idea is that everyone on that particular "smart freeway" would be required to have the hardware to support it, no exceptions.

Yes, I understand that would be quite regressive and has a host of other concerns. However, for the narrow purposes of easier, safer, and more efficient driving while on the freeway, I do still wonder if it will work.

Assuming your suggestion is possible, why wouldn't we just replace the road with railway tracks and move vehicles on flatbed cars instead?

No one would need to change their cars.

And before anyone mentions throughput, let's assume we can use custom track sizes and just have people drive into the side of a railway car, like it was a ferry. Should be able to stack cars two height.

I mean...you're not wrong on that suggestion :D It just seems like _something_ would be easier than solving for every.single.edge.case with generalized autonomous driving.

We can’t even get trains to drive themselves.

Seems like a gimmick.

For some years, we've had cars with HUDs that project things like speed, blind spot warnings, traffic signs, and GPS directions onto the windshield.

They're great - you can see how fast you're going without taking your eyes off the road, and chuckle when it reads a 20mph speed limit sign from a side street off the 12-lane interstate that you're driving on.

You also have a great way to signal your turning intentions to other people: turn signals.

So why would you muck about with a car's headlights of all things to display extra information? And how much do replacements cost for those 2-million pixel/1-million-micromirror headlights?

No. We need to remove all the bullshit from cars. No LCDs, no touchscreens, no heads up displays, no blinky flashy beepy distract-o-trons that take the driver's eyes off the road.

Like the undercarriage lighting that is popular in certain groups?

Does that distract the driver? Like, as much as all the bing-y beep-y pointless shit that car manufacturers fill the car with?

One of the things I hate about driving the lovely quick silent eco-friendly Renault Zoes we have at work compared to my decidedly not silent or quick 25-year-old Range Rover, is that it's like driving a Fisher-Price Activity Centre. *Constantly* there's something beeping, flashing, lighting up, switching off, chiming, popping up a message on the LCD dashboard that's bigger and brighter than my laptop screen, or otherwise demanding my attention.

The dashboard in my old Landrover has got four gauges, of which the only one I need to care about is the speedometer. Even that that, with the gauge illumination turned off you're either driving at the same speed as everyone else, or if there's no-one else you're driving at an appropriate speed for the conditions. It only beeps if it feels there's something drastically wrong, rather than "oh hey there's another car quite close to you better beep and light up a bunch of stuff so you're not looking at the car that's quite close to you".

The Zoe has a fantastic "eco" button that will allow it to accelerate like a bat with the squits, up to 60mph and then hard limit the speed so the guy behind you who is also trying to overtake the same lorry you've just pulled out to pass gets a nasty surprise. No brake lights no indication that you're not accelerating any more, just WHOOOOSH THUD. Fucking stupid idea.

Make cars simpler. Make them safer, by taking out all the distracting "safety features". Teach people how to drive more safely.

I agree. I think the answer to automotive safety is not more technology or more car. Instead, we need less car and more driver responsibility. Too many people take driving for granted and don't seem aware they're piloting a two-ton death machine through a shared space.

I drive a 28-year-old Saturn with zero gadgets and great rear visibility. I keep my lights on all the time to be seen, but nearly every week somebody tries to change lanes on top of me. I'm not sure if people are relying on their gadgets to tell them I'm in their blind spot, or if they just don't look where they're going, but I'm getting a louder horn before I end up wedged underneath an F250.

> nearly every week somebody tries to change lanes on top of me

I find this comment funny because it's exactly the same complaint my wife has when driving her F-250. "How is it they can't see this fucking massive white truck and still try to merge into me?"

Not long after I started my current job I was driving a literally Fire Engine Red Landrover Defender 110 plastered in high-vis and strobes.

A guy on a motorbike sitting in a side road looked at me, made eye contact, looked away, and then pulled out in front of me when I was about two car lengths away doing 60mph, and wobbled off up the road at about 40mph.

There was a great howling of tyres and sliding of things to the front, and some fine Gaelic words that I do not care to write down or translate.

Seeing without seeing.

I do not know why we are not just replacing all of those little tiny reflectors on freeways with with something standardized specifically for use with self driving cars. Seems like it would be a hell of a lot more reliable if those not only served as a visual indicator for humans but also a direct indicator for self driving cars themselves (could also be visual or some form of digital technology like a ranged / vehicle version of NFC, etc etc).

because your local transportation doesn't have unlimited money to replace simple reflectors with something 'standardized' for self driving cars that aren't themselves standardized and that represent a miniscule percentage of the cars on the road.

its not difficult, its just so expensive and serving a basically irrelevant portion of the road using public.

No. The road is a shared space and it should be respected as such. We already need to reduce the lumens on headlights. And probably take out "hi-beams" altogether. Seriously, I've never been in a situation where it's made a difference worth talking about. In over 20 years of driving, I can count on one hand the number of times I've intentionally turned on my hi-beams. And it was mostly to see if it would help. It did not.

In over 20 years of driving, I can count on one hand the number of times I've intentionally turned on my hi-beams.

Sounds like you've never lived in a rural area with lots of deer and other critters.

In over 20 years of driving, even in rural areas with lots of deer and other critters, I can count on one hand the number of times I've intentionally turned on my hi-beams.

If your night vision is that bad, the solution isn't to blind other drivers by turning the road into the midday sun.

You're absolutely in the minority here. Perhaps you have extremely above average peripheral vision.

I grew up in a rural area and still visit quite often. Deer jump out in front of cars all the time. It is physically impossible for me, any of my family members, or anyone I've ever known in this town to be able to see the deer off the side of the wooded areas without high beams on. High beams are not going away.

Not the GP but I have similar experiences. I do have above-average night vision, though.

This seems so ridiculous, I almost think you're deliberately trolling. All one needs to do is drive through a dark forest at night, flip on the high beams and instantly see another 200 feet ahead of you, giving you more time to see deer, fallen trees, etc. It's not about bad vision. Even the human with the best eyesight can't see in the dark. And to be clear, this is done when there aren't other drivers coming toward you.

Low beams give you around 200 feet. Which is within the stopping distance of 50mph. If you are in a situation where you are concerned about fallen trees, why are you driving faster?

To also be clear, way more people are driving with high beams or insane lumens just everywhere. My mirrors are practically useless at night because there's always some idiot with their highs on shining right in them.

The benefits of the few cases where you could use high beams are outweighed by all the times they are used inappropriately and cause way more issues.

My mirrors are practically useless at night because there's always some idiot with their highs on shining right in them.

You should see an eye doctor about that. My mother had the same issue and it turned out to be a serious problem.

The serious problem are the drivers who can't fathom not having ultra-high lumen LED headlights switched to high at all times. This is not a subjective thing. It only takes one jackass, so it's easy to see the difference between them and other vehicles.

And it's not like I'm the only one who has noticed this problem:

https://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/story/news/2018/12/20/br...

> And probably take out "hi-beams" altogether.

This is _complete_ nonsense. I'm going to guess that you are an American living somewhere with probably quite wide and straight roads.

Here in the UK, high beam headlights are largely essential on a lot of dark rural/country roads for a number of reasons — uneven road surfaces, soft verges, roaming animals and pedestrians in unlit areas, sudden turns or changes of camber. When used properly, they are an important safety device and they absolutely have a place on a vehicle.

Well, I'm an American that grew up in very rural (out in the sticks) part of the country. Not sure if this translates to UK/EU, but we have roads known as farm-to-market roads that are typically 2-lane (one in each direction) that are typically decent quality. In certain areas, the speed limit can be 85mph on these roads, but more typically not higher than 65mph. These are also typically not well lit if at all, so high beams are very important, but typically, drivers are definitely overdriving their headlights. These roads are usually pretty straight except for when they have to bend around what used to be someone's property before claimed for the right of way.

Pedestrians are much less of a concern than say deer, cows, or other animals.

In the US, we have the problem with people using ultra bright lights and not aiming them correctly, so they're blinding to other drivers.

>This is _complete_ nonsense. I'm going to guess that you are an American living somewhere with probably quite wide and straight roads.

I'd wager it's more likely he drives hazardously slow so the extra couple seconds viewing distance don't help him personally or there's always street lighting where he drives.

Edit: based on his commentary elsewhere it's almost certainly the former.

I drive to the conditions of the road. If the road is potentially hazardous, you should slow down. How is 50mph "hazardously slow" when speed limits on these sorts of roads are around 55mph?

And I only chose 50 because it is definitely within the full stopping distance.

I'm not saying this as someone who drives particularly fast. I'm saying this as someone who drives agricultural equipment that literally can't go prevailing traffic speeds. There becomes a point where you are the hazard, not them.

50 in a 55 is probably fine but "I never feel the need to use my high beams despite living somewhere rural" (I'm paraphrasing here) raises massive flags for "grandma, maybe you need to stop driving at night" type behavior and if you don't see this then that is an ever bigger red flag.

Like I already said, I picked a speed that completely falls within the stopping distance. So people couldn't claim they need it because they need to see an extra 200 feet to make up for the 25 or so in stopping distance.

Also, wouldn't the opposite be true? If I feel fine driving with my lows on all the time because I can see fine, then my vision is still acceptable. Whereas if one needs 50,000 lumen ultra-high intensity high beams to travel down a well-lit boulevard, maybe those people shouldn't be driving at night.

And if you have not paid for this feature, it displays and ad instead! I mean, come on, we all know this is what would happen.

Why let users get away with only paying once? Need to make it a subscription to capture that recurrent value stream. Make sure to communicate the price in coffees, the standard unit of nickel-and-diming. I'd drown in all those "just one" coffees companies would like me to buy

Ford's PR on this: https://media.ford.com/content/fordmedia/feu/en/news/2022/08...

Next up: Allowing drivers to virtually driver their car with VR glasses while actually driving their car. Just think, we could eliminate billboards by making them virtual! I'm sure this would be totally safe.

This sounds like a recipe for disaster. And unnecessary. Surely AR tech has advanced to the point where these road overlays can be done in a way that only the driver can see them.

It would be good to let cyclists use the road to project onto it the safe margins for passing cyclists, and to photograph the plates of cars that do not observe those margins.

Already been done about 10 years ago!

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2012/oct/2...

I've seen that. It looks like it is no longer available.

https://www.amazon.com/SUNMENCO-Cycling-Projector-Taillight-...

There's a bunch of clones on Amazon now

Can we just make headlights less blinding?

This is so cool. Also I can't wait until a headlight goes out and it costs $2k to replace it.

I recently replaced my headlight (entire assembly because it's all hermetically sealed). It was about $2000 USD. There are far more expensive.

Does anyone have a link to a video of what this will look like on rainy roads, snow and ice?

Projecting arrows for navigation would be nice, but would this work during the day?

No.

No. (Betteridge)

Shall we talk about the weather then?

We already do. The headlights are a projection, the brake lights project, the whole car is literally designed to make transformative projections across the landscape.

Resistance to the idea is just curmudgeonly churlishness.

As a motorbike rider, I can say that if you can see my rays of light, you can avoid me, and that - after all - is the ultimate goal of any horizontal translation.

Yes please, I want this.

Ah, I thought this was going to be a out entertainment. I remember driving late at night, alone for hours to go see my parents. The interstate was empty at 2am, so I would toss an iPad on the dash with it plugged into my aux port and watch a movie. 99% of the time, I’d be looking through the reflected movie on the windshield, paying attention to the road. But those scenes that are visual-only, I could shift my focus without losing my situational awareness to see what was going on and shifting it back. Only took a few ms, but I miss those days.

When I explain this to people they freak out. I’m not a big movie watcher, I like to listen to them though. So for me, it was just nice to see what was happening in those scenes where nobody is talking and you have to actually see it (you know, where the bad guy sneaks up behind the good guy and the dark music is playing). I think most people would probably actually try to watch the movie while driving, and kill themselves. Maybe that’s why they freak out.

I’ve also seen people reading a book while driving (before Teslas) and that. That takes some mad skills that I’ve never gotten even after spending hundreds of thousands of miles on the road.

Massively irresponsible.

You must be one of those people who watch movies. I would just listen, for years. Especially when I had a passenger watching the movie. With a passenger, I can ask “what just happened?” But by myself, I’d have to look away from the road to see what happened. Putting it on the dash so I could just change my focus, without taking my eyes off the road, mind, seems way more responsible.

Audiobooks, radio plays: exist.

Please stop watching movies while driving your car.

I don’t know how many times I’d have to say listen to movies.

> Putting it on the dash so I could just change my focus

So, you're watching movies. And no the next qualifier of "without taking my eyes off the road" doesn't change that you're watching a fucking movie. You're literally changing your focus from the road to a movie. You've put a screen with moving images in between yourself and the road you should be paying attention to.

I’m having flashbacks to that time I explained to my son why the sky is blue and air is clear. It’s clear that you are not grasping anything I’m saying.

I specifically put it there to be less dangerous than checking my speedometer. Driving safely late at night requires very little attention and for that matter, most of the attention isn’t directed at the road you’re driving on. You are basically scanning the road for debris, but also, and more importantly, scanning the side of the road for animals that might kill you by trying to cross an otherwise empty road. This is also very boring by the way, since 99,99% of the time, there is nothing there. By having it on the windshield, even if I shifted my attention for 500ms every 10-15 mins, to see what a sound was, I wouldn’t lose my peripheral vision and the situational awareness. There were times where the situation warranted taking it off the dash and giving 1000% of my attention, but that was rare at 3am. I’ve driven on the late night roads than most people will drive in their entire life, hell, I’ve even had military training on it.

Anything can take your attention from where it is needed while driving: loud passengers, music you’re emphatically singing to, other drivers, complacency, exhaustion, etc. knowing how to mitigate or eliminate those risks is the important thing.

> By having it on the windshield, even if I shifted my attention for 500ms every 10-15 mins, to see what a sound was, I wouldn’t lose my peripheral vision and the situational awareness.

This is a tremendous claim without evidence. I can’t believe that you think putting a screen with moving and unpredictable images in your sight line isn’t distracting.

You’re a dangerous driver even if you’ve convinced yourself otherwise.

Like I said, I have seen way worse, like people reading a book, while on cruise control. That shit is dangerous, hell, cruise control is dangerous all on its own.

I wouldn’t know if the images were predicable or not, I wasn’t watching the movie. I literally have typed that many times now, though I’m fairly certain you haven’t read it. Whatever distractions, flashing lights or whatever from the screen… have you ever driven with passengers before? Passengers are far less predictable than 99% of all movies I have ever experienced.

I’m saying you’re watching a movie because you literally yourself told us, and I quote “I would toss an iPad on the dash with it plugged into my aux port and watch a movie. 99% of the time, _I’d be looking through the reflected movie on the windshield_”

People do worse things, so your terrible choice is acceptable? Passengers are sometimes disruptive so it’s okay for you to distract yourself?

You’re deluding yourself.

I don't think you understand how people are saying that its not ok just because you've convinced yourself it isn't dangerous. If you were just listening the screen would be off.

Please stop putting others at risk and don't this nonsense. You don't have the right to put other road users at risk just because you've decided you can't be distracted.

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