Thinking of looking out the window - I was thinking whether a device like this (or perhaps a fixed camera of some sort) could be used to see and avoid. Could a computer be "looking out" for you too?
In thinking about this - two options - analysing a series of still pictures - perhaps taken every few seconds. The system would need to analyse the pics, looking for planes. I suspect it would struggle to pick out planes relative to the ground and would have difficulty working out whether something was small or just far away, unless it had some sort of array of cameras and so was able to build up a 3d version of the outside world.
The alternative is to analyse a video feed, looking for any objects that are moving relative to the ground around you - which would presumably be other aircraft. This would probably have difficulty spotting the "constant relative bearing / constant danger" situations - just as humans do. Again - without multiple cameras / 3D its going to pickup a lot of sea gulls...
In either case it would need to describe the plane / location to the pilot for the pilot to see it themselves and decide on a conflict, and any action required.
However - I've just looked up the human eye's performance compared to a camera (
here). To be close to the human eye's performance, huge resolution cameras would be required - which would mean huge amounts of computing power to process the images / videos.
So we're probably back to using the Mark 1 eyeball...