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Jaguar and Land Rover Just Created Transparent Pillars For Cars
cartechboy writes We've all been there, driving down a city street and we miss that pedestrian or bicycle because they are in our blind spot. Not the blind spot behind us, but covered up by the A-pillar on your vehicle. This is a growing concern as pillars and cars in general bulk up to meet new, ever stricter safety standards. Now Jaguar and Land Rover might have come up with a solution that eliminates the risk: transparent pillars. Imagine having zero blinds spots as you pull up to that intersection. No concerns about not seeing something or someone that's hidden by that large A-pillar. The technology is called 360 Virtual Urban Windscreen and it provides a 360-degree view out of the vehicle. How does it work? Essentially, a screen embedded in the surface of each pillar inside the car relays a live video feed from cameras covering the angles outside the car. To avoid overloading the driver the screens are off in default mode, and are only activated automatically when the driver uses a turn signal or checks over their head to switch lanes. While there's zero mention of when this tech will go into production, it's clear, this is the future and it's crazy.
Didn't Volvo prototype something like this a while back with some transparent triangles embedded in the frame?
TomB
"You can't take the sky from me..."
Not transparent... but "augmented".
(misleading title, sloppy journalistic work... as always)
Tata Motors owns both Jaguar and Land Rover, so Tata Motors has invented.. or Jaguar and Land Rover, divisions of Tata Motors
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Unless there is something particularly distracting about them....like a perceptable lag, then I don't see how being able to see more of whats around you can be overload. I am already used to looking at a scene that includes the sky, trees, and a whole mess of information beyond what I strictly need....hell, half the road is generally irrelevant as long as everybody is doing their job.
OTOH at night, screens emit light, so what it will do is light up the inside of the car making occupants more visible than they would be during the day, and possibly more visible than the pedestrian outside the car, I almost wonder if more accidents wont be saved by calling up the attention of pedestrians to the car than the other way around.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Just how stupid will people have to become before they are not allowed to drive? Can't be bothered to turn your head or use your mirrors? We have sensors for that. Can't be bothered to maintain a safe distance from the vehicle in front of you? We have a beeping alarm for that. Can't be bothered to learn good driving habits and drive safely? We got you covered. MABYE SOME PEOPLE SHOULDN'T BE DRIVING AT ALL.
To avoid overloading the driver the screens are off in default mode, and are only activated automatically when the driver uses a turn signal or checks over their head to switch lanes.
As drivers in LA never use their turn signals or turn their head to check their blind spot, these miraculous "transparent pillars" (which aren't transparent, go figure) will never be used...
Describing a concept, and making a fake CGI video of how it might work, does not mean they have "created it". They haven't even revealed where this is at in the development cycle, and the video is very clearly pure CGI. (for one thing, nothing on these augmented displays will look right except from the driver's perspective, which will be annoying for passengers, and the camera does not show the driver's perspective in this video).
With the "B column" (the column between the front and back door), why should I have to turn my head >90 degrees to see an oddly shaped screen that shows me what is only right behind the column? When I signal how about show me EVERYTHING to that side of the vehicle on a screen that's, um, like right in front of me so I don't have to take me eyes off the road or crane my neck?
Better known as 318230.
... That's the ticket, laddie.
Here's a better idea - make the A-pillar (as viewed from the drivers position) no wider than the distance between the center of your eyes. This prevents the pillar from blocking your vision, and no electronics are needed.
Place nail here >+
I don't know if video screens are the answer, but surely the pillar problem is an annoying one. When I got my new(er) car, making left turns to merge onto a busy road became quite nerve-wracking, as I had this huge blindspot that no amount of craning my head could compensate for right smack dab where I needed to be looking. This was a problem especially on turning out from the road I lived on, because the view on the left was further obscured by a building and the road to the right was an overpass and so basically cars would drive into the blindspot before you could see them anyway. I missed the hell out of my old car at those times.
When I'm driving, I'm usually make small movements with my head. A static, non-head-tracking display may well be more distracting, and probably more dangerous, than the original blind spot.
Really? I've never seen a car that didn't have the turn-signal lever on the left. Is that because I'm an ignorant American?
Ignorant? yes. American? Well that I don't know.
My understanding is that it is related to where the car was manufactured. I found this thread that talks about it Why are New Zealand turn signal controls backwards?. (And from my point of view, "backwards" is a contextual adjective ;-) )
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I've found that properly adjusted mirrors, and active monitoring of traffic via all the mirrors is enough to avoid rubber necking the blind spot. The problem is, most people don't have their mirrors set correctly.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The summary mentions the screens activating when a driver "checks over their head to switch lanes." Are new Jaguars and Rovers able to leap up or fly or something? I don't understand how or why you might check over your head to begin with, and especially in the context of making a lane change.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
The solution is to stop using laminated layers of thin sheet metal for the roof pillars and to use something more durable for a given volume.
The implementation of side-curtain airbags and of stronger roof-strength requirements should not come at the expense of something as fundamental as view.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I was going to ask how they deal with parallax and perspective: the need to account for the position of the driver's head so the the projected image properly lines up with the scene beyond. But the images in TFA make it clear: they haven't. This is a mock up. Nothing has been created, and Jaguar - Land Rover hasn't the faintest idea how to make it work for real.
Not at dealerships. Last time I went to a new car dealer, I found the 2-year old like-new certified pre-owned car at 90% of the MSRP. Sure, I could have looked in the classifieds, but I haven't found the prices drop as fast as people assert.
Many people assert that you have an increased chance of a lemon. If you have a lemon, are you more likely to sell it when it's showing no problems, or keep it? So, lemons would be disproportionately for sale. If you disagree, what part do you disagree with?
Learn to love Alaska
nothing on these augmented displays will look right except from the driver's perspective
And only from one head position!
Every time some concept car âoeinventsâ video-cameras-instead-of-mirrors, I wonder whether it's occurred to anyone that mirrors show a different view depending on the position of the viewer. Is that so fundamental that we just forget it entirely?
So fast it's street legal, but not track legal because it's too unsafe.
That's how it should be. Why should the person that buys the performance car be saddled with the weight of a roll cage and tranny shield when they'll drive it around in town all the time and never see 40 MPH? And that's NHRA rules. To take a car on a banked track and go 100+ mph in it, you need seatbelts and a motorbike helmet. SA isn't needed unless you have a cage. And NHRA rules are more strict because they assume a greater likelihood that you put your car together with bailing wire. The track days generally are quite lenient on standards, for generally stock cars.
So your 11 second car is NHRA illegal, but SCCA legal. Are you asserting that NHRA is "safer" than the SCCA for that? I've not seen stats, but from the number of crashes that end up on YouTube, I'd guess that NHRA is less safe, but that may be because NHRA is more likely to be filmed. When I was heavily active in the SCCA (and only barely active in the NHRA), any SCCA incident, of any kind was well known for hundreds, if not thousands of miles.
Learn to love Alaska
I think Jaguar solved the problem of bild spots on their cari in 1964
http://www.sportscardigest.com/wp-content/uploads/1964-jaguar-xke-series-1.jpg
With style, I must add.
You appear to have copied and pasted the entire internet into your post.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it