This Is What Autonomous Cars See

Looks a lot like the videogame Rez to me. (If any of you get that reference, I’ll be really happy.) From Fast Company:

Most of the autonomous vehicles being built today—by Google, BMW, Ford, and others—navigate the roads using a scanning system called lidar. Lidar captures an extremely accurate 3-D model of the surrounding scenery, but reflective surfaces, severe weather, mist, and rain can throw off a lidar scanner. And like all machine learning, lidar scanning isn’t yet an equal match for human intuition: there are still situations that it doesn’t understand. In the Times article that accompanies the video, writer Geoff Manaugh uses the example of a car confused by a cyclist doing a track stand, or confused by someone wearing a shirt with a stop sign on it.

For the video, Matthew Shaw and William Trossell of London-based design studio ScanLAB Projects deliberately disabled certain aspects of the scanner that safeguard against some of these mistakes in order to explore the possible misperceptions of autonomous vehicles. This can be seen when the car approaches a bridge, for example, and accumulated layers of data appear like a tunnel of light. In other instances, a double-decker bus is stretched to look like a long structure, and glass towers appear as smoke.