Ford Unveils Holographic Technology to Keep Eyes on the Road
By Jim Motavalli
Wed, Sep 25, 2024 9:08am
3 min
3 min
Ford, working with Scottish company Ceres Holographics, showed off last week what could become the future of head-up displays, or HUDs as they’re commonly known.
HUDs almost magically display useful information such as speed and turn-by-turn directions on the lower part of the windshield, where it can be seen without taking the driver’s eyes off the road. For years now, automakers and their suppliers have imagined an autonomous world in which cars drive themselves, and the glass currently needed to see traffic could be turned into big display scenes at will. But the arrival of full self-driving is still a long way off.
At a conference in Detroit, Ford displayed an interim step: what might be called HUD 2, a bright, clear display stretching across the windshield with three sections, two for the driver and one for the passenger. The latter, which could include projected video, would not be visible to the driver.
Andy Travers, the CEO of Ceres Holographics, says that the new display possibilities could be interactive, and help solve the dangerous situation of driver distraction using current controls.
“It’s compelling cost-wise for automakers to put everything on the screen,” Travers says. “And they’re hiring programmers who are used to working with computers, not mobile cars that need to have drivers watching the road. We think it’s a lot better to make choices from projected images on the windshield than having to look away to a centrally mounted screen.”
Stellantis
The windshield incorporates Ceres-developed (with Eastman and Carlex) thin-film technology that is produced with embedded holographic optical elements and then sandwiched between laminated glass sections to enable a transparent display of any kind of information. Travers says the film will not discolour over time. An inexpensive LED projector, technology in use now, is built into the instrument panel.
Regulators are taking notice of the distraction problem. According to Matthew Avery, director of strategic development at the safety agency Euro NCAP, “the overuse of touchscreens is an industry-wide problem, with almost every vehicle maker moving key controls onto central touchscreens, obliging drivers to take their eyes off the road and raising the risk of distraction crashes.”
Janice Tardiff, a coating application technical expert at Ford, says the passenger display on its initial prototype vehicles would target entertainment and possibly business applications.
The driver would get fuel or charge level, speedometer, navigation, and, on the centre display, points of interest and music. In a customer clinic testing the technology, participants liked the idea of being able to see sports events and movies, but weren’t sure that the clarity was sufficient for business applications. Some wanted the displays to be bigger.
Use of the film has been thoroughly tested and approved for next-generation HUD use, Tardiff says. The next steps are to improve colour, brightness, and resolution, optimise the size of the displays, and ensure good performance under different light conditions, she says.
HUD was an option on the Oldsmobile Cutlass in 1988, and it’s been steadily evolving since. Other companies are working on holographic technology, including Hyundai, Stellantis, Jaguar Land Rover, and General Motors. Technology shown by a U.K. company called Envisics on this year’s Chrysler Halcyon EV concept car imagined images on auto windows that would show points of interest along the chosen route, allow video calls en route, and map constellations in the night sky.
But not all of this would be able to go into current cars.
“While all this visual information is probably too distracting for a driver in control of the vehicle, it may not be when the vehicle is operated in an autonomous Level Four mode,” according to Envisics. “At this level, the driver can relax and utilise these functions and features.”
But some of it will be seen soon. A Chrysler/Dodge spokesman, Darren Jacobs, said via email, that “select design elements and features [seen on the Halcyon] like the head-up display and SmartCockpit are ready for production and will be included in Chrysler’s first all-electric vehicle.”
The Ford-Ceres technology is possible for production today, and it could lower driver distraction and prove satisfying for auto buyers—especially if image clarity can be improved.
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Some have no qualms about treating ChatGPT like their servant; ‘Just like humans, AI can’t always be the bigger person.’
By PREETIKA RANA
Wed, Oct 16, 2024 4 min
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California couple Vikas Choudhary and Ridhi Sahni can’t agree on one thing: How polite must one be with ChatGPT?
Choudhary, the founder of an artificial intelligence startup based in Palo Alto, has fawned over the chatbot from OpenAI ever since it helped him squash a massive bug in his code.
“You’re a rock star,” he once told the AI chatbot.
“I’m super thankful for it, and I thank it quite a bit actually—especially if I think I was rude to it earlier,” said Choudhary.
His wife couldn’t care less. “If I’m using a microwave, I don’t go like: ‘Dear LG, Please heat this up.’ I just press a button and get on with my day,” said Sahni, who also works at a tech company.
She uses ChatGPT to generate cute greeting cards for friends’ babies.
“I think of this as purely transactional,” she said.
As talking to chatbots is now becoming more like normal conversations, AI users face an awkward ethical dilemma: Bots are programmed to be polite, but do we have to reciprocate? Is it wrong to speak harshly to them?
The debate has spilled onto social media where many people say one should practice politeness even with bots. Others think wasting kind words conversing with code is inefficient.
“I know AI isn’t real but it feels so rude if I don’t greet and thank it,” one user wrote on Reddit, prompting hundreds of comments and a lively debate over whether bots are keeping tabs on who is nice to them.
Some shot back with sarcasm. “AI will want to extinguish human race but not that one, he said ‘please and thank you’ 30 years ago to my 4.0 version,” one user wrote.
“I treat chatgpt like it’s my servant,” another said.
A recent survey showed Americans are split on being polite to AI. About 48% of 2,000 Americans surveyed by Talker Research thought it was important, with Gen Z respondents being the friendliest to bots. Around 27% of people agreed it was OK to be rude with or shout at bots.
One study out of Japan—a place where rules of etiquette are ironclad—concluded that being nice to ChatGPT can pay off. Impolite prompts “may lead to increased bias, incorrect answers, or refusal of answers,” the researchers found.
They found that the thesis held true across English, Japanese and Chinese.
Microsoft , which has added chatbots to its top products, says AI may not react well to bad behaviour as it is built to mimic human reactions.
“If you speak to the model rudely, you can expect it to be difficult with you too,” said Microsoft’s Chief Scientist Jaime Teevan.
“Just like humans, AI can’t always be the bigger person,” Microsoft said in a blog post.
Offering tips
Engineers say it helps to add phrases like “take a deep breath” to make models produce better answers. They joke that generative AI has a “praise kink” for its apparent need for positive affirmations and potential rewards.
In one experiment, ChatGPT gave longer answers when lured with a tip. The results indicated that responses were 11% longer when offered a $200 tip and 6% longer for a $20 tip. No real tips were paid during the experiment.
“The litmus test for how good a person you are is if you are nice to a waiter,” said Alana O’Grady, an executive at a tech startup based in San Mateo, Calif. “In the future, it’ll be how kind you are to your AI companion.”
O’Grady has used ChatGPT for a host of activities—from summarising reams of documents at work to recommendations for a family vacation to Lake Tahoe.
Her interactions start with a “Could you please” and end with “Great job,” or “That’s perfect!”
“People will think I’m crazy if they see how I talk to a computer,” she said.
Now O’Grady is training her children on the right etiquette by being polite to Apple ’s virtual assistant, Siri, around them. Her 4-year-old daughter recently said “I love you” to Siri.
Judith Martin—the author behind decades of “Miss Manners” books and columns on etiquette—suggests people be polite. She even thinks getting Siri or Amazon Alexa’s attention with a “Hey” is unacceptable.
“When it is one’s constant companion—and particularly in the presence of children—such devices should be treated with civility,” she wrote in one column .
Others disagreed, saying there should be a distinction between how people talk with people vs. bots.
‘Helps me to calm down’
Some humans are now turning to AI for help with etiquette. Frankfurt-based software developer Laszlo Deak uses a chatbot to vent and translate his work frustrations into polite prose.
He asked ChatGPT how to constructively tell another team that their product was bad. It suggested using kinder phrases to say it wasn’t working as well as expected.
“When you’re in the moment and angry, it takes extra effort to rephrase the whole thing,” said Deak. Reading ChatGPT’s iteration “helps me to calm down.”
He has also used ChatGPT to draft Slack messages to colleagues when they’re being difficult.
Mazen Lahham, a Dubai-based tech executive, said his company’s AI was better at satisfying angry and aggressive callers than its human call-centre workers.
“The AI learned to absorb and react in a calm, professional manner, something that can be very challenging for a human,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post.
Choudhary, the Palo Alto-based startup founder, is betting his good behaviour might pay off someday. “In the future if the AI overlords take over, I just want them to remember that I was polite.”
