If you've driven long enough in our wonderful traffic, chances are that your car sports a miscellany of dings and scratches. Whether you re trying to squish your car into a tight parking spot or just dealing with rush hour traffic, being able to see through it would be a big help. Enter Susumu Tachi from the University of Tokyo.

Tachi has developed a system that will let you see right through your car, thanks to stereo cameras mounted all over the car (his system uses them on the passenger side). You then don the (admittedly ridiculous and ungainly) headset, which projects the images from the cameras on the surface you re looking at. And voila! Your car's transparent!

Tachi's transparent car uses the same principle as his invisibility cloak, which projects the image behind it on to the surface itself. By combining the data about your head's position and the images from the stereo camera, the system can scale and adjust images so that they appear exactly as the outside world would.

Watch the video [MPEG].


Source: NewScientist