When you're in the (oxymoronic) driver's seat in a driverless car, what exactly does the car "see" as it pilots down the road with you on board? How does a car visualize the terrain it encounters, capably navigating around the occasional obstacle or two it incurs along the way from point A to point B?

Researchers at ScanLAB Projects, a UK-based design firm, wanted answers to these questions — so to get them, they attached a laser scanner to a Honda CR-V and took it for a spin on the streets of London, capturing what the car "saw" in a series of images.

While this particular driverless car had an actual driver steering it, the the sonar-like Lidar system ScanLAB fitted to the Honda CR-V shot off lasers in each direction, while measuring the amount of time required to bounce back from each object (i.e., bodies and buildings) in the general vicinity. The data collected from the Lidar scans was then parsed, processed and processed again to come up with the end visual.

What resulted was a surrealistic 3D rendering of the city of London (including well-known landmarks like the House of Parliament, Big Ben and Westminster Abbey) made up of vibrant, eye-popping laser lines that, in the end, is a perfect marriage between art and tech.

See London through the eyes of a driverless car in the video below.

Via: Engadget