Slashdot Mirror
Headlights That See Through Rain and Snow
wisebabo writes "I think it was Newton who said if you knew the position and velocity of every particle in the universe, you could predict the future down to the effect the flutter of a sparrow's wing would have on the weather. Aside from quantum indeterminacy (which, of course, he knew nothing about) and questions of free will, it is clear we are a long long way from getting even close to the theoretical limits of prediction. Still, here's something that, to me, is very impressive. Some researchers manage to track raindrops (or snowflakes) in front of a light and, in real time, change the beam so that they are not illuminated! This drastically reduces glare. The obvious application is for driving cars in inclement weather. I'm hoping we're entering a new age where computers (and cheap sensors) have become so powerful as to make possible a whole host of 'magical' (like Arthur C. Clarke predicted) applications."
Thats impressive
I'm hoping we're entering a new age where computers (and cheap sensors) have become so powerful as to make possible a whole host of 'magical' (like Arthur C. Clarke predicted) applications."
The word you're looking for is, "feedback".
A prototype headlight system can detect raindrops or snow streaks and "dis-illuminate" them, thereby increasing visibility on the road ahead.
Simon says, 'delluminate'.
Here is another possible idea: LCD screen on windows. Track driver eye position. Create opaque circles exactly positioned on the lines between eyes and sun. Far better than those flip-down sunshields. Added bonus, someone will be able to hack it to obscure billboards too.
Can we adapt this tech to my TV for when my wife casually walks between me and the screen while I'm playing Call of Duty?
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Or you could just reduce speed according to road conditions. Get off my lawn! This and the back up cam will clearly make it easier to see the expressions on the faces of pedestrians as you run them down. And that's something I can get behind.
'Free will' (read: your brain) is special and sits outside the sphere of the physical realm?
Besides the fact that according to recent advances in the cognitive sciences free will is increasingly overrated.
A very interesting approach and quite cool. But I have some doubts. For me, the most annoying during rain is the glare from the wet road itself. When very wet, you can't see the markings (because of glare) which can lead to dangerous situations. The article does not mention this. And a second thing: shouldn't we be ditching headlights completely and go for a more sci-fi approach like HUD's, sensors...? Predator did quite a good job...
Actually you'd also have to be an outside observer of the universe to predict its future, as any computer inside the universe would also have to predict its own actions before they actually happened.
"I think it was Newton who said if you knew the position and velocity of every particle in the universe, you could predict the future down to the effect the flutter of a sparrow's wing would have on the weather."
Doesn't sound much like the kind of thing Newton wrote, have you got a citation for it?
-wb-
I also wonder if it would be possible to create an "invisibility suit" with e-ink rain drops if you wanted to commit a crime near a busy road!
I remember reading some of Larry Niven's earlier SF stories in which a variation of this was used on his spacecraft. They were made out of Puppeteer General Product hulls which were transparent in the wavelengths their customers "saw" in. Anyway, the spacecraft hulls had this sun screening trick.
There was one story ("Neutron Star"?) in which the protagonist worried if any of the other alien species saw in X-Rays.
He didn't predict that at some arbitrary point in the future technology would have the appearance of being magical, he didn't make a prediction at all in this regard. His statement "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." (presumably) means "Any sufficiently advanced technology relative to the observer's baseline is indistinguishable from magic.", but that isn't as catchy.
If you could show someone from the 1700's an iPhone it would be "indistinguishable from magic" to them. If an alien race were to zip into orbit tomorrow at faster than light speed it would be "indistinguishable from magic" to us as we don't have any idea how that can be achieved, or even if it is possible. The technology described in the article is impressive but clearly distinguishable from magic, the article describes how it works.
and questions of free will
Free will has NOTHING to do with determinism. Free will has no meaning except from the point of view of whoever exercises it, and he can not predict his own behavior without predicting deciding to predict his behavior ad infinitum, what makes no sense. For everyone else, the question is absolutely irrelevant, so ability or inability to predict anyone else's actions is completely meaningless.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I know this is a different and potentially interesting system, but I had a crazy physics professor decades ago who added an infrared lamp to his headlights and he would drive in the fog with IR goggles (IR is less diffused than normal light). What was scary is that he would turn off the normal lights to avoid glare, so nobody could see him come...
Non-Linux Penguins ?
"We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at any given moment knew all of the forces that animate nature and the mutual positions of the beings that compose it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit the data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom; for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes."
— Marquis Pierre Simon de Laplace
Ok, I didn't get the quote exactly right but I think I captured the gist of it.
Big misunderstanding about Quantum Physics: It is not because our interpretation of quantum states is probabilistic that quantum physics are NOT deterministic. There may perfectly well be a deterministic behavior of quantum physics, it's just that so far we can only describe is with non-deterministic mathematics. See the Copenhagen Interpretation
http://www.transparency.org
My first reaction: That would be awesome! (I have made one too many trips over mountain passes in heavy snow storms). My second reaction: Oh god, another excuse for the idiots to drive 60 mph over snow-covered roads during near-white outs. (They seem to be under the impression that AWD and traction control means they don't need to see. Or stop.)
Use the tracking of the individual snowflakes to steer a MW laser installed on the hood of the car, that blasts all the nearby snowflakes, reducing glare.
Now it's cool.
FTA:
"Light rays from the headlight that would normally hit the raindrop are automatically switched off,"
Eh? A car headlight, even LED ones are not laser beams. The light spreads out immediately. There is no way to selectively prevent illumination from a given area using current car tech so how exactly are they doing it? You can't keep switching off the entire headlight every time there's a raindrop in front of it since there will be so many raindrops constantly in front that it will be off permanently.
Are they using some sort of DLP, laser or what?
for when a lump of snow or mud sticks to the camera lense.
Laplace's Demon
Rock Us, Dukakis.
Fantastic. Now we can drive in heavy rain at 100Km/h with lights dimmed. Sounds like a very good idea!
But I later checked and found the correct quote (by Laplace). See below.
well he was wrong, this kind of idea doesnt allow for emergance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence just as biology isnt applied chemistry knowing all the forces currently in existance doenst enable you to predict the future
well he was wrong, this kind of idea doesnt allow for emergance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
Actually, Laplace's idea does allow for emergence (you just need to know enough about the laws of physics and how they combine). Where it runs into problems is when faced with non-linearity (i.e., mathematical chaos and extreme sensitivity to initial conditions) and quantum physics (you can't ever know the initial state and there's no hidden variable theory that you can deduce by observation). In other words, Laplace was wrong but for excellent and interesting reasons.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
We all know of course that Newton was wrong in that regard.
I'm already pissed off when I have to change one of my headlights because I have to spend for that... this one...I will change into Hulk.
And I wear my sunglasses at night
So I can, so I can
See the light that's right before my eyes
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
Not sure about Newton, but future of one point in universe is determined by state of all particles in sphere with center in that point and radius of distance of light will travel from that point in time how remote future you are considering. If I remember right, some russian scientist said that many years ago. And by the way quantum indeterminacy has nothing to do with uncertain state of particle, but it only tells us that we cant observe that state. State of particle is always determined (current science is not sure about that though). So long story short, future is determined, but not knowable. Or maybe I am completely wrong :-)
An experienced driver knows how to see through the snow, and what the appropriate speed is to drive when snow is falling. Give technology like this to an inexperienced driver and you could end up with drivers who are not driving appropriately for the conditions - at which point bad things happen. And unfortunately driver errors often have consequences for people beyond just the driver of one car...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The N-body problem has been proven to have no general solution. That means the future is not predictable. And this is without Relativity and quantum mechanics. The only way to determine what happens in the future is to wait and see. Everything else is just a guess.
Don't stop where the ink does.
Some researchers manage to track raindrops (or snowflakes) in front of a light and, in real time, change the beam so that they are not illuminated! This drastically reduces glare.
Can we do the opposite, and change the beam to exclusively illuminate moving particles only? Bet it would look really cool.
Some posters already pointed out that the quote attributed to Newton is really something Laplace would have said, but it hasn't been pointed out that there is actually an established term for this line of thinking. It is called the Laplace demon.
You beat me to it.
No, you misunderstand the concept of emergent phenomena. The very idea is that complex behavior isn't magic, it's the result of usually a few simple rules interacting to produce something that looks very complex. If you know the rules and the starting conditions in sufficient detail, you can predict the emergent phenomena... surprisingly easily.
Physics supported Laplace too. Right up until quantum mechanics said that you couldn't actually make measurements that accurately. Still, IF you could... but then von Neumann and Bell came along and said it doesn't even make sense to think about making measurements that accurate, and even if you could, the interactions themselves have a random element. The question is still open because Bohm disagreed.
The system's operating range is three to four meters in front of the projectorâ"the "critical range" at which glare is most distracting,
That's the principle behind fog lights. A low, wide beam of light located below the driver's field of view.
Have gnu, will travel.
Wikipedia has a translation of Laplace's quote (of course, the original was in French, so you couldn't have the quote exactly right in English).
What, no video?!?
As I understand it ...
Rain is invisible to Millimeter radar. So a heads up display would let you see throw the rain.
Also good for when skynet is driving the cars for us.
Should work fine, until the system decides the chrome-plated car driving in front of you is a glare hazard, and decides not to illuminate it...
Personally, I think Infrared cameras are a better solution; the wavelength is long enough it goes around a lot of rain and snow. Some cars have these already, but they need to make it more standard/affordable.
You could use a black light...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
My headlight system wouldn't boot.
You're describing the hidden variable theory which was disproved by Bell's Theorem. A subtle point of the Chopenhagin Interpretation that you omitted is that while the waveforms are non-deterministic, measurements cause a collapse of the waveform that is non-deterministic and thus the universe really is non-deterministic. It's not just an artifact of the math.
How does this work at any speed, other than standing still?
They claimed they tested this in the lab, simulating different car speeds by varying the speed of the streams of water. Except the water always started off in the same place, which is not the case of a rain drop, when you are travelling at high speed. Not to mention the rain doesn't always fall straight down.
Based on the picture, it appears that it looks at the "top" to see where the rain drops are, but you if you are travelling at hghway speeds, you don't really care about the rain drops at the "top"
"Ok, I didn't get the quote exactly right but I think I captured the gist of it."
I think what you meant to say was:
"Look, maybe I didn't say every single little tiny syllable, no. But basically I said them, yeah."