Just a couple of days ago we mentioned how usage of augmented reality can help you to repair your car or to carry out highly skilled tasks. Today we would like to demonstrate how this technology can make our roads safer, allowing car drivers to see vehicles or obstacles coming from behind a curve or a building.

This system, which is being developed by a group of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, merges two video feeds shot by two different surveillance cameras into one feed, giving the illusion of being able to see through a wall thanks to its processor, which matches common points from the two cameras. By identifying these spots, the software changes the video perspective to make it compatible with the driver’s view.

The resulting feed would then be displayed on the car’s windscreen, giving the realistic impression of seeing through a wall. Images to create this impression would be picked up by a video processor which can capture feeds from security cameras that you can literally find on every street corner in our cities.

In the future, should its usage become common, it might even capture images from other cars driving nearby and using the same system, but of course, at the current stage, this is just a speculation, as development and planning of such a software carries along a wide range of obstacles to overcome before we can really see it mounted on our cars.

For now, we can only see this new augmented reality application, which has been presented at the ISMAR fair in Florida, in the demo that you can see in the video above. And who knows, maybe one day we will really be able to use it!