Auto-dimming Windscreen

It’s late night and the vehicle in the opposite direction turned on the high beam headlights for no reason. It is annoying you while you drive and dangerous. What can you do about it now? Yes you could do the high beam back to the opposite direction, or give them a honk.  What about in the morning or evening when the sun is shinning up the sky, yes you can flip down your sun visor or wear your sun glasses but these  doesn’t solve the problem properly as you might need to sacrifice your visibility area.

Soon, you will be able to counter that by using “electrochromic panels”   which will dim the brightness of certain area when voltage is apply to it.

The concept behind of this is, when the sun is shinning on the window screen the entire windscreen receive the same amount of light, is just that the hot burning ball or at night the high beam of other vehicle’s headlights on the opposite road is annoying you. So instead of dimming the whole windscreen, by using an ultrasonic range finder that could analyze the driver’s driving position and using a webcam to measure the amount of lbrightness that is coming through.

With that a micro controller will analyze and dimming the section that would strain the driver’s eye. The result, much like the Auto-dimming rear view mirror that we can find in most of the continental car on our road but in this case just an area of your windscreen will be darken. Just a tip, Peugeot 308 and Mazda 3 has auto dimming rear view mirror too.

The guys who created this prototype are two students from San Diego, United States. They are hoping the commercialized it, and hoping General Motors would be interested.

Check out the video from the Engadget post.

Source : Engadget.com