Ask Mercedes is a downloadable app that uses your phone’s camera to recognise controls in select Mercedes-Benz models and act as a virtual instruction manual. Image: Daimler.

The recently released Mercedes-Benz S-Class can be specified with an Augmented Reality Heads-Up Display (AR HUD) that projects navigational prompts and information about driving assistance systems, appearing to blend them into the environment ahead of the vehicle. Not only does this aid in keeping the driver’s gaze on the road ahead, the system can show the driver directions in real time, highlighting the correct turning point in a complex intersection, projecting house numbers or depicting traffic lights that might be positioned out of the driver’s line of sight.

It can also use the vehicle’s many cameras and sensors to highlight potential obstacles that the driver may not have seen, such as a pedestrian about to step onto the road, a bike partially obscured from view by another vehicle, or detecting slow-moving traffic or obstacles ahead.

In a sign the future has, in fact, arrived, the projector that manages this function is a digital mirror device comprising a high-resolution matrix of 1.3 million individual mirrors and a highly efficient light source of the type used in cinema projectors.

Since the salubrious S-Class regularly acts as a technological incubator for the technology that trickles down the rest of the Mercedes-Benz passenger vehicle range, it’s not a stretch to suggest this advanced AR functionality will make its way into other elements of the range as generational updates filter through.

In the meantime, other models in the range – such as the just-updated Mercedes-Benz E-Class and the newly launched GLB SUV – are able to be specified with an alternate version of the AR technology. In this application, the vehicle’s forward-facing cameras and sensors are used to create a camera view on the 12.3-inch central touch screen, which is then overlaid with embedded data augmentation to help the driver safely navigate the road ahead.

So the future – at least, the one in which Augmented Reality begins to become part of our daily driving experience and an indispensable tool for navigation and safety – is already at hand for S-Class, E-Class and GLB customers. And it’s likely to be ‘coming soon’ to everyone else.

By Steve Colquhoun