The case for augmented reality road signs, etc

First written for the Open Bagel Forum on 2021-02.11

Expansion on All street signs should become AR signs.

Imagine every car has an augmented reality (AR) display as the windshield, or that every driver wears a pair of AR glasses while driving.

An augmented reality display is essentially a regular pane of glass that can display digital elements in the field of vision of the person looking through the glass. These digital elements can be opaque or translucent, whatever makes the most sense and is the safest.

In this world, all of our road signs can become digital, created as augmented reality elements. This way, when someone looks at the side of the road through the AR display to where a digital sign is, they will see all the information from the sign on their display as if overlaid on the real world (see examples of how mixed / augmented reality works to see how digital elements can be overlaid on top of the real world). There are multiple benefits that come from this.

(1) It becomes much cheaper to create these road signs. Instead of having physical infrastructure for all this signage, it becomes a wholly digital product.

(2) It becomes much easier to change these signs as needed. Not only cheaper to create, but even cheaper to modify.

(3) You can work around the issues that arise with physical signage. No more snow covered, poorly lit, or obscured signs. Even more interestingly, signs don’t need to have one physical location, they can float along the side or top of the road for as long as needed to be useful.

(4) They can eventually be customized to integrate the viewer’s own navigation interests. Instead of “Exit 270 in 2 miles”, “Exit for home in 2 miles”, etc. This is one of many ways that a viewer’s own information could be used and integrated into the world around them.

This last point does get at an issue regarding the possibility of folks seeing different mixed reality worlds, an issue that isn’t required to exist with just the first three benefits.

There are some risks and downsides, including the traditional risks associated with digital objects: technical failure (bugs), hacking, internet connectivity requirements, cross-device compatibility, etc. Still, I think it is useful to imagine what might be possible in this world.

All this of course doesn’t even touch on the other uses that AR can have in how we build out our physical world.