(no subject)

[gfish]

After several hours of white-knuckled night driving through the Rockies tonight, I have a suggestion: Car headlights should be polarized, so you could selectively filter out the oncoming lights. Except it would also filter out your OWN headlights, though the reflections back should be less strictly polarized. So the polarization should be defendant on the direction you are going, with a rotating filter hooked up to GPS. That wouldn't be too hard.

Once this idea saves the American auto industry, a thank you in the form of an abandoned industrial plant (with its own rail spur, please) will be sufficient.

Comments

[neuro42.livejournal.com]

I suggest strobes and lcd shutters instead. Eastbound gets the even milliseconds, westbound gets the odd milliseconds.

[ashley-y.livejournal.com]

I thought car headlights were as much about being seen as seeing the road?

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

good point!

[bigbumble.livejournal.com]

The solution has been worked out long ago. All headlights with polarizing filters slanted at the same 45 degree angle and corresponding sunglasses. All oncoming cars will automatically have their filters at 90 degrees.

Now bright lights in your rear view mirror is another problem.

The scary thing is, I could set you up with an abandoned industrial plant. -But there are strings attached.

[anansi133.livejournal.com]

Oooh! Can I buy a share? I could take a length of string, in exchange for a piece of plant!

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Ooh, that's clever. Auto-darkening rear view mirrors are already a proven technology; I'd sure love to try the combination.

Truth is, unless it's in the Seattle area or *very* impressive, I wouldn't be able to take advantage of it anyway.

[anansi133.livejournal.com]

Another idea that doesn't require the cooperation of the other drivers, is having bits of LCD embedded in the windshield glass, and the car would also know exactly where your pupils are. As long as you don't jerk your head around too much, the LCDs could go opaque in exactly the right places to make two shadows over your eyes.

I don't know what the failure modes for LCD material looks like, though: it would be unfortunate if the whole display decided to go all "peril sensitive sunglasses" on you at an inopportune moment. Which would then become kind of self-fulfilling.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

We're working with several big German auto manufacturers to make LED array headlights, that detect oncoming traffic and shut down the part of the array that points that direction.
Until then, a webcam and a big screen would work pretty well as long as you trust your OS.

[neuro42.livejournal.com]

http://www.avweb.com/news/airventure/EAAAirVenture2009_ForwardVision_200814-1.html?CMP=OTC-RSS

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Someone the other day was telling me about new DLP-based spotlights which can detect the silhouette of the person being targeted and light up just those parts of the beam, so there isn't a bright circle cast around them. And of course, once you have that, you can beam patterns just onto specific people as they walk around. Pretty fun idea.

[danceswithlife]

I would so want to buy! Headlights at night make me totally crazy. Hasn't someone designed the same king of night adjustment for the driver's side mirror as there is for the rearview mirror? I often end up disabling that mirror totally at night just to survive the drive (I'm then very careful about checking blind spots before changing lanes).

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

I've never seen one, and I've looked.
However, it seems stupid to me that nobody's stuck a standard welding-style LCD filter over a mirror. It's about $20 of parts and the LCD has adjustable darkness from 0 down to #12, which I can't convert into optical density off the top of my head but it's about 1:100, far more than you'd need. Setting it up with a light sensor so it'd auto-darken at night, would be $25.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

They certainly have auto-darkening rear view mirrors, but they don't act as quickly as a welding mask. Not sure that would be a good thing, since nighttime tends to be a systemic problem...