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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."
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...
Very clever idea, yes, but I wouldn't call it impressive. It's all very simple technology we've had for a while now. Just one of those "Why hadn't anyone thought of that?" ideas.
"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.
Driving with sunglasses at night? Must admit I've never tried it, but doesn't sound like a particularly good idea. There are things you need to see out there that aren't exactly well lit.
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.
Of course it's a good idea:
Very clever idea, yes, but I wouldn't call it impressive. It's all very simple technology we've had for a while now. Just one of those "Why hadn't anyone thought of that?" ideas.
Isn't that the very definition of a clever idea?
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
"I think it was Newton..."
...but checking up before posting would be too much trouble, right?
Did Isaac Newton even know the universe was made of particles?
No sig today...
Yes. I like my statements the way I like my power supplies: Redundant. Which is the way I like my statements.
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.
Different effect. If you used normal lights with polarised lenses it may reduce the glare, but you would still see your light source reflected off the water. If the water is never illuminated, no glare is created and more of what you want illuminated is. You might get in to trouble if you wear polarised glasses and you have an LCD dashboard.
Yes. I like my statements the way I like my power supplies: Redundant; which is the way I like my statements.
I like my statements like I like my statements: Tautological.
I Like My Words Like I Like My Cities: Random Capitals.
Is the universe made of particles?
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.
"Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe." - Frank Zappa
--
BMO
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
I love a good tautology. You just can't go wrong with a good tautology...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
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'!"
Don't headlights illuminate, not detect? Bad choice of words...
You need to change that semicolon to a comma; semicolons are not used for "which" clauses.
Hit it!
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.
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 the whole idea depends on a purely clockwork/mechanistic view of the universe, with no free will or decision making involved.. That does not appear to be how the universe works though.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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!
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.
Yeah. Impressive to spend years and $$$ to achieve an overly complex version of something that can be achieved by wearing your (polarised) sunglasses. Added bonus: you don't need to buy a new car.
How is this at all similar to wearing polarized sunglasses?
Polarized sunglasses reduce horizontally polarized glare, such as when sunlight reflects off the flat road. However, this doesn't help reduce the glare reflected back from a spherical raindrop. This technology prevents light from your headlamp from illuminating the rain drop in the first place. And it does this while reducing the overall headlamp light level by a few percent, as opposed to the much greater reduction you'd see with sunglasses.
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.
There ya go, injecting facts into a perfectly distorted planted meme. You anti-trolls just suck the venom right out of stuff, ya know?
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
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.
"Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe." - Frank Zappa
-- BMO
And this is why he didn't win the presidential election.
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?!?
It's hopeless. They want everything we say to be instantly produced, meticulously researched, and entirely free from the slightest defect. Never let them see the PROCESS.
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.
Rather than drive in heavy rain at 100Km/h with full beam, as I do now while cursing the glare?
Life's too short, I'd rather risk shortening it than waste it driving slowly.
You could use a black light...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Why look it up? Everyone knows that was Dr. Ian Malcolm.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
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.
I like my coffee like I like my women: ground up & in the freezer
Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property; A Corporation is the legal fiction that property is a person.
I don't know if wearing polarised sunglasses during the night is a good idea, but I can confirm that wearing them during torrential rain cuts down the glare from the drops themselves.
In 2011, when cyclone Yasi went from category 4 to category 5 in Cairns, my wife and I called up the emergency information team, and asked if we should evacuate to Brisbane. The policewoman on the phone said "If you can." so we were packed and gone by 6 in the morning.
We hit the edges of the downpour just as we passed Townsville. Without the sunglasses, the rain was so heavy it was a total whiteout - could barely see 5m in front of the car. Despite the low light conditions, with the polarised sunglasses I could see 100m comfortably. My wife was panicking about the driving conditions, until I asked her to put her (polarised) sunglassess on.
So, in summary, polarised sunglassed DO cut down the glare from raindrops.
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"
Current headlights only illuminate. This is called a headlight 'system' because it is more than a a headlight, it is a detector as well.
Good choice of words - or how would you put it instead?
I Like My Words Like I Like My Cities: Random Capitals.
I like my coffee like I like my women: strong and black.
I like my coffee like I like my women: Anally.
That plus his hypocritical smoking.
I'd change the title from "Headlights That See Through Rain and Snow" to something along the lines of "Headlights that Help Drivers to See Through Rain and Snow."