Camera Array Gives You Real-Time Third Person View As You Drive
It's not a video game, it's the next step in automotive safety
If you’ve ever driven a car in a video game, you’ll almost certainly be familiar with the fact that it’s way easier to avoid running into stuff if you’re using a third person view. That is, viewing the car from outside (slightly above and behind) as opposed to from behind the steering wheel. A third person perspective lets you see not just most of the car itself, but also what’s going on around the car, in areas that would otherwise be blind spots.
A Taiwan company called SPTek has figured out a way to use an array of cameras to generate a 3-D “Around View Monitor” that can show you multiple different views of the outside of your car. Use a top-down view for tight parking spaces, a front view looking backwards for highway lane changes, or a see-through rear view for pulling out into traffic. It’s not a video game, it’s the next step in safety.
SPTek is relying on just four cameras, each with a 190 degree field of view, to cooperatively capture a high resolution 360-degree view of everything that’s going on around your car. A total of 100 megapixels of images are stitched together to form the virtual view that you, the driver, can explore from whatever angle you need to:
SPTek’s AVM system, on the other hand, removes the constraints of the car entirely. While you’re perfectly free to use the AVM to eliminate blind spots, having a virtual view of the entire car all at once, from any perspective, seems like it would be far more helpful under many common driving scenarios. It probably wouldn’t be a good idea to drive exclusively in third-person mode, but having alternate views on a monitor in the console of your car, or maybe even on a transparent heads-up display, could easily become a faster and safer way of verifying that your next automotive maneuver isn’t a mistake.
The AVM has already been installed on a tour bus, which makes a lot of sense, since driving one of those things anywhere urban has got to be a visibility nightmare. Since the system only uses four relatively inexpensive wide angle cameras and some fancy software, we might have a reasonable chance of seeing it show up in passenger cars in the near future.
Evan Ackerman is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. Since 2007, he has written over 6,000 articles on robotics and technology. He has a degree in Martian geology and is excellent at playing bagpipes.