April 20, 2015—The BMW Group unveiled a prototype of goggles that would turn the world into a digital display at the Shanghai auto show on Sunday, according to a report from Automotive News.
The report said the goggles show the kind of information that's found on a BMW heads-up display, such as the speed limit and vehicle speed.
The glasses can also tell the driver when to turn, tap into camera feeds to help during parallel parking and offer navigation directions.
BMW said that rather than just displaying information in the corner of the driver's eye like Google Glass would, it wanted to anchor that information by tracking the driver’s gaze and making the information pop up appropriately based on the location of objects in the real world.
BMW engineers said they are waiting for the industry to mature to avoid having to build and sell a headset of their own.
“We can deliver the application,” Robert Richter, an engineer from BMW’s r&d center in Mountain View, Calif., told Automotive News. “We can deliver the technology. The only piece missing is the piece of hardware.”
The goggles would run on Google’s Android operating system and would cost roughly the same as a high-end smartphone.
