erman luxury carmaker Audi has revealed the interior of its latest electric vehicle, the Q4 E-Tron, which is presented as a modern SUV equipped with a few new technologies that are being incorporated into Audi vehicles.
The centrepiece of all the innovations that Audi debuted on Tuesday is the new Augmented Reality Heads-Up Display (HUD) embedded into the windscreen, which offers the driver a wider field of view with enhanced, accurate animations.
Audi gave some use cases, including:
- turn-by-turn navigation that places a bright blue arrow in the driver’s field of view;
- the AR system placing a red line over a lane marker to let a driver know when they’re drifting too far to one side;
- an animation that tracks the car ahead when using adaptive cruise control.
Audi stated that the new augmented reality system has over 1,000 AR signals from sensors placed all over the Q4 E-Tron to accurately detect where to display the AR elements and to pin them in the correct position, even when driving over bumpy surfaces.
It is one thing when a HUD is small and only displays relatively static data, for example the vehicle's current speed, however, as soon as the field of view increases and dynamic graphics are incorporated, it is essential to make sure that those elements look like they are actually adhering to the real world. If they do not, it is possible that they may become distracting and even worse, disorienting.
It is still unclear how well Audi have pulled this off as the company only showed a select few animations of the augmented reality display in action. But as the full reveal of the Q4 E-Tron is in April, we do not have long to wait until people start driving the SUV, to get a sense of what it’s truly like and find out how advanced the HUD is.
More from
Latest News
category
