Cooperative Augmented Reality: Displaying Occluded Vehicles using V2X Communications

As urban mobility increasingly integrates micromobility solutions such as bicycles, innovative road safety solutions have become a priority for these Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs). This work explores the use of Augmented Reality (AR) and Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications to enhance cyclist safety at intersections with obstructed visibility. We propose an AR-based system that enables cyclists to visualize occluded vehicles using an ‘X-ray’ vision effect, leveraging real-time V2X messages and edge computing for low-latency interaction. The system architecture integrates multiple communication technologies, including 5G and ITS-G5, ensuring reliable transmission of road user data. To evaluate the system’s feasibility, we conducted a real-world demonstration in the Aveiro Tech City Living Lab (ATCLL) platform using a Microsoft HoloLens 2 AR headset and an NVIDIA Jetson-based object detection pipeline. The system was tested in a real environment and results show that: (1) response time for total system latency falls within the 300 ms safety threshold defined by ETSI (which assures system safety); (2) the system operates on 3.75 FPS; and (3) increasing the video cameras’s frame rate does not significantly affect resource and power consumption.