If ...
If that's a godlike perspective, God needs to go to specsavers.
Fujitsu has come up with a system that will give motorists a full 360° view around their car, from an almost god-like perspective. The Fujitsu rig is based on four vehicle-mounted cameras and clever software that stitches the images together into a third-person perspective-like view that allows the driver, it's claimed, "view …
..but good.
oh those japanese boffins!
presumably, one could watch this whilst driving and then crash into someone because you weren't paying attention to the road in front?
..or is it only for parking?
quite cool!
cheers,
bill
p.s. stuff and nonsense: http://www.eupeople.net/forum
pirate sign, because you'll be able to see if anyone tries to board you!
(mines the leather jacket...)
Drivers in the UK do not use mirrors, signal nor perform checks of their blind-spots when changing lanes or doing any other manoeuvre; what makes Fujitsu think they'll use this? Most drivers in the UK are too thick to even work out what lane they should be in, let alone navigate a virtual 3D image.
Can you imagine how dangerous this will make motorways with the lane-hogging, tail-gating dimwits staring at their little screen rather than looking where they are going?
If your vehcile's mirrors don't give you enough vision, this simply means you are too dumb to drive. Either because you don't know how to set them up correctly, or you were mentally deficient enough to buy a car with poor all-round vision.
Make a safe car with decent visibility but is butt-ugly (anybody remember the Maestro and Metro? -like sitting in a goldfish bowl), or make a dangerous car that you can't see out of but looks sexy. Oooo... I'll take the sexy one, please, with an additional £1000 worth of electronics to slightly mitigate the problem of it being a death trap.
So, how long before the birds perfect their target practice on those cameras? They seem pretty good at getting that bit that's in your line of sight but not covered by the wipers, and I'm sure they do it on purpose!
Imagine the insurance claims: I crashed into that car in the car park because a bird had shat on my camera and I couldn't be bothered to actually look where I was going.
Can they teach it to recognise a stop sign/red light and apply the brakes? How about recognising when the lights turn green and announcing "go you idiot, it's on green. It's been green for 30 bloody seconds, get on with it." (etc)
Kind of curious - when infinity introduced their Around View Monitor no one on this side of the atlantic noticed, but when fujitsu (which have no car ties whatsoever) taut a segmented omnicam setup for feature detection, like people in AI faculties the world over have been letting their students in machine vision 101 play with, it's newsworthy?
http://www.autoblog.com/2007/03/29/infinitis-around-view-monitor-is-watching/
at least that one's already used in a production vehicle.