Pioneer's AppRadio 2.
If you own an iPhone, you can choose from a surging sea of add-ons that work with it: speaker docks, in-car gizmos, game controllers, and much more. If you have an Android phone–well, if you’re lucky, the company that made it sells some peripheral devices. (Motorola, invented of such add-ons as the Lapdock, is especially conscientious here.)
I’m in Tokyo for CEATEC–the Consumer Electronics Show of Japan–and have been roaming the show floor and discovering nifty stuff. Some of it will show up in the U.S. eventually; some of it won’t.
Pioneer, which makes lots of aftermarket electronics for cars, is demoing a rather unusual visor. It’s an augmented reality heads-up display–Pioneer calls it an AR HUD–that uses lasers to overlay text and images on the road ahead. By doing so, it can do driving directions that use the world around you for imagery, not a digital recreation on a screen in the dashboard.
The technology should show up in commercial form in 2012, Pioneer says–in Japan at first, in a model that can be installed as an aftermarket accessory. It may be built into cars later, and should reach other countries. The price hasn’t been set yet.
(Full disclosure: I spoke at a CEATAC keynote and the show subsidized my travel costs.)
