HUD History: From World War II to the First Hologram

    The car dashboard is a source of important information for the driver. In the near future, it risks losing its significance - HUD displays, which we would like to talk about technology today, are already claiming for this place.

    It all started with the reflex sights of military aircraft. Decades later, technology has been developed in civil aviation and the automotive industry.

    This solution formed the basis of one of WayRay products. This is the AR Navion navigation system , which allows you to integrate all the important information: route, current speed, POI , - directly into the surrounding reality. Image Wayray




    We will understand how it all began, and how developments for military aviation continue to change the modern civilian automobile industry.


    War period


    Like many inventions that still serve us today, HUD technology came from the military industry. The ancestors of transparent displays can be considered reflex sights on German military aircraft from the Second World War. HUD technology arose from the need for pilots to find hostile targets in the sky, using navigation information and not being distracted from the flight.

    The first displays solved the aiming problem, and after that they began to display details about the speed of movement and the angle of attack, which became a milestone for military aviation. In 1942, the image from the radar indicator was combined with the projection of the gyroscopic sight on the flat surface of the windshield, and this led to the birth of the projection display.


    Photo Shawn / CC-BY

    HUD remained in combat aircraft after World War II. The next stage in the evolution of information displays is to equip the British Blackburn Buccaneer attack aircraft with an integrated Head-Up Display. The first flight and practical application of HUD in the air occurred in 1958. Again, the technology served by no means peaceful purposes: it helped in guiding missiles and in attacks from low altitude. The British piloted the Buccaneer from 1968 to 1994, and all this time important information for the pilots was displayed on the glass.

    In the 60s of the XX century, the French test pilot Gilbert Klopfstein created the first modern HUD and a standardized character system for it. Thanks to this, the pilots were able to transfer at the helm of various combat vehicles without additional training. As with many technologies, unification has brought the use of HUD to a new level.

    Passenger aircraft


    Entering a peaceful sky did not become the next stage in the evolution of HUD, because the war period for displays did not end there, and it is unlikely that this will ever happen. Projection display technologies and augmented reality continue to be used both in aviation and in other aspects of military affairs: soldiers use Google Glass analogs to determine goals, and the picture that appears before their eyes is very similar to the work of HUD in modern cars.

    Projection displays took "some" thirty years to find use in the civilian sector: HUD found a place in the Boeing 737 only in the 90s, although the earliest attempts to instill pilots with the habit of monitoring flight parameters on the screen were already in the 70s x The projected information helps to take off and land, monitor speed, altitude and routes not only on mass passenger ships like the Boeing 737 or Embraer 190, but also on regional aircraft and even business jets .


    Photo by Shawn / CC-BY

    In passenger aircraft, the next step for the HUD, accordingAviation Today should be a combination of artificial and infrared vision technology. The new generation systems already consist of a remote processor that interprets aircraft location information and combines it with an integrated database. The resulting image is transmitted to a small projector mounted above the pilot's head.

    Everyday use


    Although this thought would have met with some skepticism some thirty years ago, transparent displays came to the masses thanks to the automotive industry.

    The pioneer in the use of a HUD based on a production car was General Motors Corporation with the model of the Oldsmobile brand - Cutlass Supreme - that had already ceased to exist in 1988. It’s customary to think so, but the truth is that GM experimented with transparent displays back in the 60s, that is, it happened at the same time as the first Buccaneer flights with HUD.

    Then, corporations were not afraid to unveil photos of concept cars. One of the early sketches of the legendary Mako Shark II of the 65th year contained a real device for displaying on-board information. In a primitive, but recognizable form. HUD on Mako never came out, as well as an improved version of the sports coupe.

    Over the next two decades, the technology had few points of contact with the earth, and the mass consumer still did not suspect its existence. HUD flashed in the futuristic concept of the Pontiac Trans Sport in 1986, but, as history has shown, this model became an ordinary minivan in which there was no place for innovation.

    And then came 1988. The updated Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, the one that was used to shoot the "Deadly Weapons", is launched on the market. In addition to the unsurpassed style of the time, the car had a vacuum fluorescent tube and reflective optics, which together were able to project all the useful information about the trip to the windshield.

    Soon after, the technology began to spread. Early models were monochromatic. By the late 90s, Corvette was already equipped with a HUD with tachometers and an engine temperature indicator. Pontiac later adopted the HUD as standard on Bonneville. In 2005, the world's first four-color HUD was proposed based on the Cadillac STS.

    For a long time, the transparent screen remained a luxurious bonus, available only in premium models. At the same time, the projected picture suffered from low resolution and did not always correspond to a high bar. In 2009, research appeared on a projection device using holographic projection technology.

    Such projectors are based on a liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS) to modulate the rays of red, green and blue light, which ultimately creates a full-fledged image. After 6 years, Jaguar Land Rover adopted them for their cars.

    What's next?


    According to the IHS Automotive report , by 2020, more than 9 million vehicles with HUDs will appear on the roads - this is due, in particular, to the cheaper implementation of HUD-solutions. Another area of ​​technology development in the context of the automotive industry is improvement on the way to full-fledged augmented reality.

    Present and Future WayRay NavionIt is connected with the second direction and relies on a holographic combiner - a mirror that combines the picture and the image of the real world. This approach allows you to achieve the largest (compared with other projection systems) the angular size of the image and increase the distance to the generated image on the road. A sharp increase in angular size allows you to display images combined with the real world (annotations to objects), and to "draw" a route directly on the road.

    In addition, Navion, in contrast to the "classic" HUD, can "control" the distance to the image being formed. We call it “True AR” - it allows you to display information on glass in such a way that it “lies” on real objects, and the pilot is not distracted from the road, since the eye does not have to refocus on the image on the HUD.

    As for the industry as a whole, in addition to improving display technologies, there is a trend towards an increase in the functionality of augmented reality. Companies traveling along the AR path combine the HUD with various sensors and add the so-called “intellectual information” to the holographic display: lane departure warning and collision risk.

    Such developments can hardly be called simply HUD - these are full-fledged AR solutions that the creators of the first “transparent displays" could hardly imagine. So the technology, used decades ago by military pilots, became the progenitor of developments that turned the car into an artifact from the "future that has already arrived."

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