A automobile company in China has a cartoonish approach to curing road rage.
XPeng has unveiled a unusual latest feature designed to subdue offended drivers — though it can also prove to be a distraction.
Suppose you’ve ever thrown a digital banana peel at an opponent in Mario Kart. In that case, you would possibly know the satisfaction that throwing something like a digital shoe or an offended face would illicit.
The Guangzhou-based automobile company has developed an augmented reality game that enables the user to fireplace off emojis on the wrongdoer, which can project over the windshield in 3D space and provides the illusion of hitting the cars.
The steering wheel can have a customizable button that serves as a trigger, and the system will discover the goal through its camera array before launching the emojis that appear to blow up against the true automobile.
While they won’t be as satisfying as throwing up the center finger or watching the cup of coffee you hurled splash against your enemy’s automobile window, it could provide drivers with some temporary relief from pent-up anger.
This system, dubbed the “Road Rage Reliever,” was unveiled earlier this month during a presentation in China.
XPeng CEO He Xiaopeng said the bizarre feature represents “technology-driven emotion,” Fast Company reported.
“We used to prioritize technology first, but starting this yr, we’ll prioritize experience first,” Xiaopeng said, adding that the AR game is a strategy to “be civilized and experience ‘civilized frustration’ moderately than engaging in dangerous behaviors.”
Road Rage Reliever converts the windshield right into a virtual battleground featuring an 87-inch-wide augmented reality heads-up display (AR-HUD) that takes up the motive force’s entire sight view after which some.
In response to the developers, XPeng and Chinese electronics manufacturer Huawei, this system has advanced optics and calculates the precise distortion needed for the eyes to consider that things should not displayed on the windshield, but moderately floating within the space 33 feet in front of the automobile.
The optical illusion convinces the brain to interpret the 3D objects as real, the businesses claim.
The event comes as road rage has change into an increasing problem across the globe. Within the U.S. alone, 92% of Americans have said they witnessed road rage in 2024 and 89% said they’ve been a victim, in keeping with Consumer Affairs.
Though road rage isn’t latest, there was a big spike in violence a result. In 2024 alone, 116 people were killed in road rage shootings and 362 were injured, in keeping with Siegfried and Jensen.
But the large query is whether or not or not its protected, with already growing concerns about driver distractions with touchscreen infotainment systems in cars.
XPeng said that “drivers are liable for judging when it’s protected to make use of.”
Studies have shown that heads-up display systems can significantly improve the topics’ attention to dangerous areas, particularly in comparison to traditional displays in the midst of the dashboard that force the motive force to take their eyes off the road.
The HUD placement keeps eyes in the motive force’s forward field of view, but some research shows that drivers were more more likely to glance at HUDs in comparison with traditional displays, which may make them “potentially distracting … Since the HUD is in the motive force’s field of view, drivers may fixate on it and fail to perceive events within the environment,” the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said.
Nevertheless, that study refers to traditional automobile HUDs which might be essentially small dashboards in the sector of view, like those in high-end luxury cars like BMW and Mercedes.
The XPeng feature overlays real AR elements onto the road and makes them a part of the environment — which could potentially increase attention, improve response time, and reduce the issue of processing information in dangerous scenarios.
