You haven’t started driving on the open road for real unless you’ve overtaken a few trucks, right? If you’re going to drive far, you’re going to get stuck behind trucks – that’s a fact. Problem is you never pass them, because it’s just too hard to see around them..

Turning the wheel ever so slightly to the right, you peak around the truck to see if it’s clear, only to have Oom Jannie scream past you in his Hilux. It just ain’t safe to be doing this anymore, and one Portuguese Scientist, Michel Ferreira, tends to agree.

Ferreira took a look at the problem, and came up with a solution that would work with existing technology. Why should we look around the truck if we can just look straight through it?

Basically, the “See-Through System ” takes the visual data being recorded by the forward-facing webcam on the dashboard of the truck,and wirelessly transmits that to the transparent LCD screen built into your windshield. What, you didn’t have yours installed yet? Tisk, tisk – if you had had the presence of mind to get one, and the truck in front of you had a webcam, this is what you might see.

Crazy, right?

The only problem is, because these things work wirelessly, there’s a possibility that the system might lag. You know, like imagine the image on the other side of the truck freezes like a YouTube video. Yes, that could happen.

Not to worry though, as Ferreira says that their tests “show that the latency isn’t more than 200 milliseconds, which translates to about 10 meters at high speed and won’t make any difference with safety in real-world driving.”

Of course, you could just get a Vespa and avoid the problem all together.

Brought to you by Vespa

[Source : Smithsonian Magazine]