Tesla has unveiled a 3D reconstruction parking assist system that serves as the long-awaited bird’s eye view.
Bird’s-eye view, a vision monitoring system that provides a top-down view of a vehicle to help with parking and navigating tight spaces, has become a popular feature in premium cars and has even come down to the mass market in recent years.
It’s almost ubiquitous in most modern luxury cars and is offered in tech packages in many lower-priced vehicles.
But Tesla, a premium brand, has never offered the feature.
CEO Elon Musk said it was coming, but that was in 2020.
It’s taken more than 3 years, but it’s finally here – sort of.
It’s not a traditional bird’s eye view, but it basically does the same thing and more.
Elluswamy describes the feature:
This replaces the 2D obstacle band that customers had with a high-resolution 3D reconstruction of the Tesla’s surroundings. This is an extension of our Occupancy Network with much higher resolution to help with tight parking manoeuvres. Obstacles are modelled as a continuous distance field. This allows us to represent arbitrary shapes in a smooth and computationally efficient way. The vehicles you see are not some fixed mesh, but the network’s real-time prediction of the shape.
The engineer says that the feature is now coming as part of the Tesla Holiday Update, which is a welcome addition as we previously reported that the update was otherwise quite weak.
However, the feature is only coming to Tesla Vision vehicles without ultrasonic sensors (Model 3/Y from 2022 and Model S/X from 2023).
Elluswamy says the feature will eventually come to older Tesla cars with ultrasonic sensors, but he didn’t confirm a timeline.
