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A pretty neat concept for people in a car’s backseat.

By Drew Johnson

Rear-seat entertainment systems have steadily improved over the last few years, but General Motors has developed a new technology that could revolutionize the entire industry.

Most rear-seat entertainment systems include a couple of screens and a DVD player, but General Motors has developed a new system that transforms a vehicle’s rear-windows into a virtual playground.

Developed through a partnership between General Motors Research and Development and the FUTURE LAB at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Israel, the new system – dubbed the Windows of Opportunity Project, or WOO for short – uses a vehicle’s rear windows as interactive displays. Students at Bezalel developed four different apps for the system, including Otto – an animated character that goes along for the ride – and Spindow, which lets the user see out of another user’s window anywhere in the world in real-time.

“Traditionally, the use of interactive displays in cars has been limited to the driver and front passenger, but we see an opportunity to provide a technology interface designed specifically for rear seat passengers,” said Tom Seder, GM R&D lab group manager for human-machine interface. “Advanced windows that are capable of responding to vehicle speed and location could augment real world views with interactive enhancements to provide entertainment and educational value.”

GM says WOO wasn’t developed with mass production in mind, but notes it could be made into a reality through the use of “ smart glass” technology. Smart glass is becoming common place in other industries, but has yet to make its debut in cars – outside of movies like Mission Impossible.

After GM and Chrysler filed for bankruptcy last year, it was hard for a car geek like myself to give them much respect. Visions of executive boardrooms with bloated, out-of-touch white men running the show, filled my head. Late model American cars like the Sebring and Impala epitomize the worst thinking in automotive design today. And don’t even get me started on the PT Cruiser……

I figured the Volt was the one product at either with any kind of forward-thinking innovation. Late last year, GM did quietly introduce a concept for the PUMA, a collaboration with Dean Kamen, which was a small, beefed-up Segway device. It showed a nice integration of Kamen’s gyro-stabilization in a small, urban runabout.

Now, GM has officially unveiled some crazy cool pod cars, and it shows they have some far-reaching thinking going on in some of those boardrooms. Somehow, I don’t believe they were thought up in Detroit.

via Wired:

General Motors sees a future where people navigate crowded cities in big Segways that look kinda like a Dyson vacuum cleaner and can drive you home when you’ve had one too many.

Seriously. The General unveiled a trio of electric “urban mobility vehicles,” built with help from the über-geeks at Segway, today in Shanghai. They’re called Electric Networked Vehicles and they’re designed for cities bursting at the seams with traffic.