If you haven’t already cluttered your car with talking gadgets and navigation systems, then here’s something else you might want to pop into your driving machine one day: a new augmented reality windshield that’s being developed by General Motors. While the windshield is still years away from the assembly line, car enthusiasts and tech geeks are already getting excited about the idea.

The “enhanced vision system” aims to help drivers navigate through dark or foggy conditions. The system would alert the driver by highlighting landmarks or outlining obstacles like a running animal on the windshield to help the driver avoid collisions.

Here’s how it works. A bunch of forward-looking sensors, including infrared sensors and visible cameras on the windshield, gather data on the external environment. Three other cameras inside the car track the driver’s head and eyes to determine where he is looking. Both sets of data are then paired up so that the enhanced views can be projected on the windshield, overlaid over the actual scene outside the car. This enhanced view or “augmented reality” would clearly point out obstacles on the road, so the driver can avoid them. GM suggests that GPS directions could also be projected onto the glass, so the driver doesn’t take his eyes off the road.

Technology Review explains:

To turn the entire windshield into a transparent display, GM uses a special type of glass coated with red-emitting and blue-emitting phosphors–a clear synthetic material that glows when it is excited by ultraviolet light. The phosphor display, created by SuperImaging, is activated by tiny, ultraviolet lasers bouncing off mirrors bundled near the windshield.

This may all sound a little distracting for the driver. But Thomas Seder, the lab group manager for the Human Machine Interface Group at GM, says: “We definitely don’t want the virtual image that’s on the display to complete with the external world; we just want to augment it.”

Technology Review reports that the augmented reality windshield is not the first of its kind:

Head-up displays (HUDs) are already used to project some information–like a car’s speed or directions–directly in front of the driver, through the windshield, or even through a side view mirror. These sorts of displays have started appearing in high-end cars, and typically work by projecting light to create an image on part of the windshield.

GM hopes to have the augmented reality windshields in the market by 2018. Click here for a video on how the fancy windshield works.

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Image: General Motors

When we last covered NASA’s Stardust mission a couple weeks ago, we noted that it was one of those missions that just keeps popping up as new findings from its data makes the news. But Stardust might by outdone by another: Cassini, which continues to reveal new surprises about Saturn and its moons—not to mention sending back beautiful images like this new batch. Today in the journal Science, Cassini researchers review six years of Saturn science (here and here) by the hardy spacecraft.

The first review tackles the planet’s atmosphere and magnetosphere. Before Cassini, scientists thought that the magnetosphere, the shield from the solar wind that forms around a planet, contained nitrogen ions that had come from Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. Cassini showed that wasn’t so, and that wasn’t the only surprise about the magnetosphere: The spacecraft’s observations showed that it is dominated by water, part of which comes from water vapor plumes that shoot out of geysers on the surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. “The big news is that Saturn’s space environment is swimming in water,” said Tamas Gombosi, a Cassini scientist [Space.com].

And then there are those rings. The scientists released these new photos with the studies. These images are true color, except the black-and-white one and the one with the bluish ring, which is enhanced. You can see the reddish tinge in some of the rings [io9]. Cassini showed that these famous features are not serene circles, but active and mysterious regions. That reddish tinge Cassini spied comes from a contaminant that still hasn’t been identified. Also, the mission documented the perturbing objects and pulls of the moons that shake up the rings. With Cassini the rings “went from like a very beautiful cardboard cutout … to a real 3D structure,” said Jeff Cuzzi, Cassini’s interdisciplinary scientist for rings and dust [Space.com].

Cassini has already been in Saturnian orbit since June 2004, and with its recent mission extension, will keep studying the mysteries on Saturn, Titan, Enceladus, and more until 2017. You can keep up with Cassini on Twitter. And while you’re at it, follow us.

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80beats: Does Enceladus, Saturn’s Geyser-Spouting Moon, Have Liquid Oceans?

Images: NASA/JPL/CICLOPS