Driving Blind: This Headset Lets You Drive in a Car Without Windows
Science
Speaker 1: Imagine a car that lets you drive with no windows and absolutely no view of the road. It feels like something you might expect out of a bond film or on the bat mobile. But this futurist SP tech is real. It's a mixed reality headset called the 360 display from Honeywell. It can be used in virtually any vehicle and it gives you a 360 view while you drive, even if you can't see a thing. It's [00:00:30] designed for military vehicles driving in situations with low or no visibility, think armored trucks or cars driving in dangerous environments. But this isn't just for Offroading. Honeywell says the tech could be used in everything from fire trucks to ships and aircraft, and one day you might even see it in your regular everyday car. We got an exclusive look at this brand new tech and how it could change the way we drive.
Speaker 2: [00:01:00] The
Speaker 1: Honeywell 360 display is essentially a head mounted advisor that you wear while you drive. You just climb in, pop on the helmet and flip down the visor. Then you're seeing in mixed reality a view that brings in all the data and vision from sensors installed all over your vehicle. Honeywell well tested this tech around a military grade. H one Humer fitted out with cameras, sensors and off the shelf infrared night vision. [00:01:30] But the idea is that it's sensor agnostic. So you can use this display in any vehicle.
Speaker 3: It's really taking sensor inputs from cameras. Um, you can use speed indicators, pretty much anything that can be displayed or that has a sensor on the vehicle and it's feeding that into our display. Uh, with the camera system, uh, we're really creating a 360 degree virtual view dome, [00:02:00] so everything's blacked out. Um, but you're sitting in the car and you can drive it. Basically it feels like you're driving in a convertible.
Speaker 1: When you're driving. The display can provide information like terrain traffic or even landmarks. It lets you look around to see alternate views like a rear view camera, and it shows you a kind of third person drone view that gives you a top down view of the car. We've seen some of these features on consumer vehicles with things [00:02:30] like advanced parking assistance. Then there's Tesla's driving visualization, which shows you an animation of your surroundings while you drive, but you certainly can't drive your Tesla with black plastic covering all of the windows. And the other thing,
Speaker 3: If you have cameras underneath the vehicle, you can actually look down through the floorboard and see the ground.
Speaker 1: Honeywell says the headset is ultra low latency. They wouldn't tell us the exact latency speed, but that it's designed to show high risk footage in pretty much real time. It's also [00:03:00] stereoscopic, so your left and right eyes are actually fed different images just like they would be in the real world. All of that according to Honeywell, means the driver doesn't get motion sickness or visual fatigue. That makes sense with a lot of VR experiences you might have tried, you're standing still while the visuals you see whizz past, but in this case, the world you're moving through as you drive the turns, the stops, they match what you're seeing through the digital display. As a result, Honeywell [00:03:30] says there's no real learning curve with this tech. Just put on the headset and go.
Speaker 3: It is literally a, a climb in and drive experience. Virtually no training required. From my personal experience, it's amazing driving around in probably less than 60 seconds and it was truly like driving in a convertible, but without all the wind blowing in my hair.
Speaker 1: Honeywell developed an early version of this technology for DPA's ground X vehicle [00:04:00] technologies program in 2018. The goal was to create a system that would make military vehicles like tanks or armored cars more mobile and agile. That early prototype tech was installed into a blackout atv according to DPA drivers using the Honeywell display, did their test drives at roughly the same speed as drivers who had full vision. But there are also use cases outside the military,
Speaker 3: Autonomous vehicles, even ships, uh, ground vehicles, [00:04:30] heavy construction, mining, really any vehicle that has, you know, potentially limited visibility or needs to operate more safely in a low visibility or hazardous environment.
Speaker 1: And importantly, it's potentially not just for ground transportation. Honeywell says it could integrate sonar data on ships to help cruises navigate crowded waters or in urban air mobility. In a future of autonomous aircraft and drones, this tech could help pilots [00:05:00] navigate through increasingly crowded skies. And while it was tested in a Humvee, you might even see it in your own car one day,
Speaker 3: It absolutely could be adapted into consumer vehicles, um, where you, you put on advisor or you know, maybe someday in the future, a pair of glasses and you can have your speedometer, your navigation directions, your stereo controls, you know, whatever it is you have, all of the sensors you have in the car now your backup camera, um, you won't have to look down at your console. [00:05:30] You can see it right in your field of view.
Speaker 1: So what do you think? Could this be the future of driving? Let me know in the comments below and be sure to subscribe to CNET for plenty more cool futuristic car tech and plane tech and o tech. We've got it all really. I'm Claire Riley for what? The Future Bringing You The World of Tomorrow, Today.
