SAN FRANCISCO—The first iteration of Google Glass was a valuable experiment. It started out as a neat concept that enjoyed a lot of hype, but it exposed a lot of problems that practical augmented reality still faces—battery life, processing power, not to mention the huge social implications of carrying a camera on your face in public. But BMW Group and Qualcomm think they have an answer to those problems, and the answer involves making the use case for augmented reality a little more narrow.

Enter Mini Augmented Vision. The system is a pair of glasses that integrate with BMW Group's Mini cars to project helpful information in a low-impact way over the wearer’s immediate field of vision. Rather than try to be everything a smartphone is—but for your face—Augmented Vision is simply "the next iteration of the head-up display,” a representative from Mini told Ars. The Research and Technology branch of BMW Group has been working for years on ways to improve heads-up displays, which were born from airplane technology, giving fighter pilots critical information without them having to look down at their instruments (and away from the sky). [Osterhout Design Group also contributed to the function and form of the glasses, providing support for the development of the optical and electronic technology inside them.]

Where Mini Augmented Vision departs from the standard HUD is that the glasses are connected to the Mini so they can take cues from sensors and cameras placed in the car and on the car’s body. In addition, the prototypes offer some limited information about your surroundings to make “first and last mile” travel easier (that is, walking to your car and then getting to your location after you’ve parked).

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Ars got a chance to test out a demo version on Thursday, and although these glasses are nowhere close to production-ready, they’re very neat. Like Microsoft’s Hololens, they make us hopeful about the future of augmented reality.

The working prototypes of these Mini Augmented Vision glasses look like big aviators with heavy brow lines; all the computing power is housed above the lenses in an extra-thick and heavy casing. That includes a Snapdragon 805 processor as well as some inertial sensors and cameras. Interestingly, BMW and Qualcomm seem adamant about restricting the use of the cameras on the glasses to prohibit any privacy issues. The cameras "are used for determining position of glasses in the vehicle and are not intended in any way for producing and storing videos or photographs as far as the application is concerned,” a Mini press release stated.

Despite the extra weight, the Augmented Vision glasses are self-contained. There’s no power cord necessary unlike Microsoft’s Hololens prototype. Information is displayed stereoscopically and in HD on a smaller set of lenses inside the larger outer lenses, making the Augmented Vision glasses capable of fitting custom lenses for people with prescriptions. The glasses are also Wi-Fi-, Bluetooth-, and GPS-equipped, but the two companies said that an Internet connection was not necessary to use the glasses as long as the wearer had a smartphone to download data from.

Once on, a quick one-time calibration is required so that the glasses can tell how far apart your eyes are, an important part of delivering the best 3D images. Calibration and a (very) brief practice session with the glasses’ one button—which functions as a miniature trackpad and selection button—took less than five minutes.

On the second floor of the downtown San Francisco Mini dealership, a representative guided me around a small space with some posters for fake events. When the posters entered my line of sight, the glasses displayed tags around my field of vision telling me that one of the events was sold out. Tickets for the other fake event were, thankfully, still available somehow. I “purchased” those in the nick of time. (Although really my fake events calendar has been a little too full lately.)

Luckily, I was standing right next to a demo Mini so I got in the car and took a “drive” through an early-Sims-like environment. Every time I had to make a turn, giant arrows were displayed in front of my eyes, navigating me down roads that existed in my “real world” view (on a screen in front of the Mini's windshield).

At one point, I got a text from one of my fake friends. A small icon appeared in my field of vision, so I pushed a button on the right side of my steering wheel. The car read the text aloud for me.

Later in the drive, as I was idling next to a crowd of fake people, a woman dropped a basketball. I turned my head to look at the incoming ball and I was able to “see through” the door as the basketball entered my path. Although BMW and Qualcomm call this “x-ray vision,” it’s essentially just getting feeds from one of three wide-angle cameras tucked away on the body of the car. While basketballs don’t hit your car every day, this might be especially useful for a person who has a hard time not kissing the curb when parallel parking.

All information gathered from cameras and sensors and navigation data was presented to me seamlessly, and the system didn’t stutter or falter. The user interface on the Mini Augmented Vision glasses is supported by Qualcomm’s mobile vision platform called Vuforia. Vuforia assists AR glasses and other mobile accoutrement with object recognition and tracking by offloading those tasks to a remote server. Although it was only a demo, and in the real world there certainly might be some lag that could harm the viewer’s experiences, I never felt nauseous. That's something I’ve had a hard time with in my limited experience with VR goggles.

One thing to note is that the top part of the glasses started getting pretty warm towards the end. But with a foam buffer between my forehead and the plastic, I didn’t feel uncomfortable.

So what’s the point?

Sure, augmented reality glasses for a car do seem a bit gimmicky—do you need a whole extra accessory that does what a smartphone on a dash mount can do slightly less well? BMW and Qualcomm were quick to point out that this demo is essentially a very advanced proof of concept, but a production device could apply to any model of car, not just a Mini.

While these glasses look a little cumbersome, people pay for expensive, over-sized sunglasses all the time—why not have them be more useful? As I went through the demo, I was pleased by how the information was presented in a way that was not overwhelming and never required me to turn my attention to the gadgets around me while I was “driving.” That’s something research has shown can be dangerous—safety is something that infotainment systems in modern cars often overlook.

While Google Glass ultimately fizzled out, I can see something like this Augmented Vision catching on because it serves an explicit purpose and doesn’t threaten the privacy of others. Jay Wright, vice president of Qualcomm Vuforia, told Ars that this narrower vision might open the doors to better AR. “Maybe this head-up display for your life starts as a head-up display for your car,” he said. “Maybe this happens to be one of the consumer applications that really drives this category.”