Heads-up displays in cars can hinder driver safety

Heads-up displays (HUDs) in cars were once a rare thing. More and more, new cars now come with HUDs as standard, and you can even buy aftermarket HUDs. HUDs project useful information like the car's current speed and navigation directions into the driver's field of view, saving them from having to look down at an instrument panel or display, the idea being to reduce distractions and keep a driver's eyes on the road. But a study from the University of Toronto led by Ian Spence suggests that HUDs might actually have the opposite effect and can even be a threat to safety.

According to the study, published last month in PLoS ONE, the question of how our brains deal with dividing our visual attention between spatially commingled information isn't currently well understood. Rather, most studies have looked at how divided attention works when performing a single task that requires us to get visual information from two distinct spatial locations (i.e., looking down at an infotainment display and then at the road). The researchers wanted to get a better idea of how commingled division of visual attention works in practice, using a simulation of an augmented reality HUD to do so.

Augmented-reality HUDs are are tantalizingly just out of reach right now, but thanks to several decades of video games, most of you will be familiar with how they work. The idea is best explained by the image above, a concept from Jaguar in the UK that shows a performance augmented-reality HUD overlaying an optimum driving line on top of the road surface. Cars are increasingly covered in an array of sensors (optical, LIDAR, ultrasonic, radar, infrared) which are combined and analyzed to warn of impending threats—"is that tractor-trailer getting too close," for example, or "is that a deer in the middle of the road?"

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