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Technology
Aug. 13th, 2010 09:38 amWe've ordered a new car, a current-model Toyota Prius. It's new and high-tech and all. In particular, it has two things that kind of weird me out: radar and HUD.
The car has a freaking radar. Sure, it doesn't look anything like the one I slept in front of back in the military, but still. It's a radar. The car uses it to keep track of cars in front of it, so the cruise control can adapt its speed to them (it also uses the GPS, a camera and image recognition software to tell if the car in front is slowing down because it's about to go onto an off-ramp).
And it has a HUD. For those of you not entirely familiar with the term, it means that things like the speed indicator and related instruments get projected onto the windshield so the driver can see them without taking her eyes off the road. In the late 90s I sysadmed for some of the people designing and building the HUD systems for the Swedish JAS-39 fighter aircraft. We talked once about why HUDs weren't used in cars, and they thought that'd never happen. The system was just too large, too power hungry and too hard to make reliably visible in a wide range of conditions. Sure, they could do it with the sort of constraints and budgets military planes have, but for ordinary cars? No way. Except now it's here. At a guess, the major thing making it possible is probably advances in laser diodes giving a lot more light with a lot more control for a lot less power, but I really have no idea.
Those things together with the robot lawnmowers we saw in several places earlier this summer make me feel like I'm living in the future.
The car has a freaking radar. Sure, it doesn't look anything like the one I slept in front of back in the military, but still. It's a radar. The car uses it to keep track of cars in front of it, so the cruise control can adapt its speed to them (it also uses the GPS, a camera and image recognition software to tell if the car in front is slowing down because it's about to go onto an off-ramp).
And it has a HUD. For those of you not entirely familiar with the term, it means that things like the speed indicator and related instruments get projected onto the windshield so the driver can see them without taking her eyes off the road. In the late 90s I sysadmed for some of the people designing and building the HUD systems for the Swedish JAS-39 fighter aircraft. We talked once about why HUDs weren't used in cars, and they thought that'd never happen. The system was just too large, too power hungry and too hard to make reliably visible in a wide range of conditions. Sure, they could do it with the sort of constraints and budgets military planes have, but for ordinary cars? No way. Except now it's here. At a guess, the major thing making it possible is probably advances in laser diodes giving a lot more light with a lot more control for a lot less power, but I really have no idea.
Those things together with the robot lawnmowers we saw in several places earlier this summer make me feel like I'm living in the future.
