Honda and Audi show the future of driving at Nvidia conference

This digital instrument cluster in the Lamborghini Aventador is powered by an Nvidia chip.

(Credit: Wayne Cunningham/CNET)

SAN JOSE–Over the past decade, new in-car electronics have helped us navigate and made more music easily available while driving. But if the work shown at Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) is any indication, bigger and better changes are in store.

Among the many automotive seminars at this year’s GTC, Honda showed off its development of a head-up display, while Audi discussed its initiatives to make urban driving safer.

In Honda’s seminar, Victor Ng-Thow-Hing, Principal Scientist at the Honda Research Institute in Mountain View, California, showed head-up display technology that makes current production examples look extremely primitive. Instead of simply projecting a speed readout or turn-by-turn directions on the windshield, Ng-Thow-Hing demonstrated work in augmented reality, projecting location sensitive information useful to drivers.

Cars on display at the GTC using Nvidia technology were this Lamboghini Aventador, a McLaren MP4-12C, and a Tesla Model S.

(Credit: Wayne Cunningham/CNET)

In one example, street names were projected onto the windshield in such a way as to appear to be signs on actual buildings. Ng-Thow-Hing explained that merely showing a flat street name o… [Read more]

Car Tech: An automotive blog from CNET