Heads-up displays have been in cars for a while now, at least since 1988 when Oldsmobile started putting them into Cutlass Supremes. (And I bet you thought the Corvette was the first car to have it.) In certain ways they are very handy: having instrumented readings available without having to look down at your instruments can come in handy, especially when it is unwise to look down at the actual gauges: racing, bad weather, the traffic-from-Hell in the Seattle area, for example. But is there room to improve?

I borderline the gap between Generation X and the Millennial Generation. For the most part, I’m older school in thought and action. However, I grew up playing video games. When Gran Turismo came out in 1997 we bought the Playstation and the game just so we could fill the house with the sounds of a 1967 Corvette 427 bouncing off the wall  at 7000 rpm at Turn 4 of whatever track we were racing on. That carried on and even today I’ll find myself playing Forza 4 (no, I haven’t upgraded yet), and the biggest benefit of the advanced games have made is that Forza has a system that directs you to the best racing lines and braking zones via colored road-stripe dashes on the track. It helps me haul ass around Infineon Raceway in a ‘90s Impala SS without sending the big barge into the stands. Could something like that help a standard driver, or would it just be a virtual pain to deal with?

Jaguar thinks so, and is developing a system that would turn the entire windshield into a heads-up display. Currently the theme is racing, so you would get markers for the proper racing line and braking, as well as typical readout. Additionally, you could upload “ghost cars” to the display so that you could try to better yourself on the track. But the hope is that the technology would be able to be applied to production cars for more practical purposes, such as heads-up traffic warnings with potential detour route markings. As far as the racing thing, I have a feeling that sanctioning bodies won’t like the idea of a driver racing “ghost cars” in the middle of LeMans or Silverstone.

Click play below to see Jaguar’s virtual windshield in action!

(Thumbs up to Jalopnik/Damon Lavrinc for the video)