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Mini augments ride with X-ray specs

Marco della Cava
USA TODAY
Mini Augmented Vision consists of a pair of large goggle-style glasses that provide its wearer with heads-up display information ranging from vehicle speed to the ability to see-through panels thanks to exterior cameras.

SAN FRANCISCO — Talk about bucking tech trends.

Google's once auspicious wearable computer project, Glass, has just gone back to the drawing board. And all most automakers and some tech companies want to talk about of late are self-driving cars.

Yet Mini has just teamed with Qualcomm to make a prototype pair of augmented reality glasses that serve mainly to let drivers get more enjoyment from piloting their own vehicle.

"There's lots of talk now about autonomous cars, but people who buy our cars are young and tech-savvy and love to drive," says Pat McKenna, manager of product planning of Mini USA, a BMW-owned brand that in 2000 took the storied if stagnant British nameplate and energized it with hip marketing and German engineering. "These glasses would just keep our drivers focused on the road."

Dubbed Mini Augmented Vision, the goggles have no consumer release date. While they have an unmistakably cartoonish look, their capability is far from a joke. Sketched out by the Osterhout Design Group, the glasses pack two stereoscopic HD displays that, using Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS, overlay virtual information over the real world — something many tech observers consider the Holy Grail of augmented reality.

At their simplest, the glasses provide a constant heads-up display of anything from vehicle speed to real-time street sign information. At their most outrageous, they give the driver X-ray vision, allowing them to see through the car's doors by syncing up with outboard cameras positioned around the car.

A promotional video made by Mini follows a hip, male driver around the streets of Barcelona. He dons the glasses while walking out of the house: they allow him to unlock his car, note his speed and be watchful of a skateboarder zipping along just outside the passenger's door.

At another point, he's walking around town and stops to stare at a few posters that are presumably encoded with information the glasses can decipher. One is for a concert; the Mini Augmented Glasses tell the driver it's sold out. The other is for an art show, and the glasses ask if he'd like to plot out a course for the gallery, and promptly transfers the info to the car as he hops in. Once he's arrived and parked, the glasses continue to show him the walking route via huge white arrows.

"We call that feature the last mile, which makes sure you get to your destination whether you're in your car or not," says McKenna.

When the topic of Google Glass and its recent fate comes up, Qualcomm's Jay Wright immediately points out that some of the key stumbling blocks for Glass aren't present in Mini's venture.

Mini's augmented vision goggles, designed by Osterhout Design Group, are aimed at helping Mini drivers stay focused on the road while providing them with info updates not possible from normal instrument clusters.

"We feel we've addressed the key barriers Glass had, which had to do with fashion, privacy, interaction with the device and battery life," says Wright, who's behind Qualcomm's Vuforia mobile vision platform.

"On the first, well, mostly you're wearing them in your car, so you care a bit less about how you look. On privacy, we have no cameras recording images. The interaction with the device happens mainly through the steering wheel. And you're using it mainly while driving so battery life isn't an issue. In this context, the barriers to augmented vision really can start coming down," he says.

The roots of the Mini Augmented Vision project date back more than a decade to when parent company BMW — which in January showed off a self-valeting car at the Consumer Electronics Show — first started to put fighter pilot-inspired heads-up displays in its luxury vehicles. When customers selecting this pricey option often opted to re-order the feature, it signaled that anything more the company could do on this front would be embraced by consumers.

The decision to go with Mini first comes down to the brand's youthful image and clientele, says Robert Richter, a top engineer with the BMW Group Technology Office, which has long had an outpost in Silicon Valley.

"Customers who are young also tend to love technology," he says. "While heads-up displays are great, augmented reality is infinitely better for the simple reason that the information changes based on where you turn your head, as opposed to staying in a fixed place on the windshield."

Ultimately, the most fascinating thing about Mini's AR project is that it represents a way for consumers to dip into the world of augmented reality gradually and privately, a lesson that Google learned the hard way with Glass considering how much its cyborg look was criticized and its wearers were ridiculed.

"Glass was great in many ways, but we're looking into an evolution of that, to a reality where glasses serve as the heads-up display for your daily life," says Wright. "For us, it was critical (for wearers) to both see through to the real world, but also have helpful virtual information show up overlaid on top. That was hard to solve for, but that's where we're going."

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