Cooperative awareness in vehicular networks is
probably the killer application for vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) com-
munications that cannot be matched by infrastructure-based
alternatives even when disregarding communication costs. New
and improved driver assistance systems can be introduced by
extending their reach to sensors residing in neighboring vehicles,
such as windshield-installed cameras. In previous work, we
defined theoretical foundations for a driver assistance system
that leverages on V2V communication and windshield-installed
cameras to transform vision-obstructing vehicles into transparent
tubular objects. We now present an implementation of the actual
See-Through System (STS), where we combine the communica-
tion aspects with the control and augmented reality components
of the system. We present a validation methodology and test the
system with multiple vehicles on a closed road segment. This
evaluation shows that the STS is able to increase the visibility
of drivers intending to overtake, thus increasing the safety of
such critical maneuvers. It also shows that Dedicated Short
Range Communication (DSRC) provides the required latency
for this delay-critical inter-vehicle communication, which could
hardly be guaranteed with infrastructure-based communication
technologies.