AI Sun Visor Latest Car Tech From Bosch
Sun visor car tech? Bosch unveils a winner at CES 2020.
Your car’s sun visor is probably one of the last places you would think to look for the latest in-car tech gadget. Thankfully that’s not the case for the Bosch. They’ve recognized a problem that’s as old as the car, and come up with an innovative solution.
Being blinded by the sun while driving is one of those problems that most people (and companies) don’t even think about solving. It falls into a category of “That’s just life”, it’s just part of how the world works, it’s not really a problem that was created and can be addressed. Bosch sees it differently, sees it better, and now so will we.
Modern cars are incorporating driver-facing cameras. These cameras are used for safety features such as monitoring driver fatigue and driver attention. They may cause an audible alarm to be played in the cabin when the driver appears to be falling asleep or paying more attention to a phone than the road. Bosch has a new technology for this as well, but that’s for another post. First, the Virtual Visor.
Announced in conjunction with CES, Bosch’s new Virtual Visor uses these same cameras combined with an LCD technology in the visor to create the Virtual Visor. The images from the camera are analyzed to determine where the driver’s eyes are, and when the sun is shining too brightly into them. Then, a portion of the LCD in the windshield is darkened to reduce or eliminate the glare, just over the driver’s eyes. Here’s why this is better than the solution we have now:
- The driver doesn’t need to reach up and move a physical visor. You could leave it down all the time.
- Only the necessary portion of the driver’s view is shaded instead of the large area blocked by a traditional visor.
- I expect this happens more quickly than the driver could react physically.
- This could be the end of broken sun visors
- The driver can’t decide not to block the sun from their eyes, which leads to accidents.
This last point is the most important. A study of life-threatening motor vehicle crashes in bright sunlight published in the journal Medicine found that “The risk of a life-threatening crash was 16% higher during bright sunlight than normal weather”1 and that for patients who died as a result of the crash, bright sunlight was 32% more likely to have been present.
Car technologies like Bosch’s Virtual Visor aren’t just cool tech – they’re serious improvements, and can save people’s lives. That’s very cool.
1Redelmeier DA, Raza S. Life-threatening motor vehicle crashes in bright sunlight. Medicine (Baltimore). 2017;96(1):e5710. doi:10.1097/MD.0000000000005710 [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5228668/]
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