Blaupunkt, which has been for some times in the Personal Navigation Device (PND) business – with a lukewarm success – unveiled at the end of last week a real innovation for the market: augmented reality. Indeed, the two new personal navigation devices of the brand boast software that overlays navigation instructions (such as arrows) to a real-time live video feed of the road picked by a camera.

This technology, called “Video-Navigation” by Blaupunkt, has been so far shown in the lab, but not seen on the shelves. TomTom has a patent in this area and its Eindhoven research center (formerly Siemens VDO Eindhoven) has been working on it for a couple of years. However, there is still to be seen how useful – and safe - it is for a driver.

Nevertheless an additional functionality built ussing the video feed is very clever: the camera detects speed limits road signs and warns the driver according to its current speed, a much more effective technique than the speed limits offered by Navteq and Tele Atlas which are not that accurate and obviously unale to take into account temporary constructions on the road.

The Travel Pilot 700 and 500 are the two devices to offer this technology. The video feed of the road ahead is generated by a 2 Mpixel camera integrated to the device. Obviously to process smoothly the video feed on the fly a robust platform was needed. Blaupunkt chose the SiRFtitan navigation processor with an ARM11 core processor running at 500 MHz and a co-processor at 266 MHz.

The platform is TMC ready and the Eastern and Western Europea map data is coming from Tele Atlas. Both devices include Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and a full software suite to support this connectivity: Internet browser, Email client, VoIP software, Podcast reader, webradio as well as PDF, Word, Powerpoint, Excel readers.

In addition to these high end specifications, the Travel Pilot 700 has a DVB-T receiver for mobile TV. These devices are supposed to ship as early as this month and the price could be between €400 and €500.

Watch below the video from Blaupunkt to get an overview of the “Video-Navigation” feature.