Mercedes Unveils Digital Headlights That Project Street Signs, Markings Onto the Road Ahead (newatlas.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: Mercedes has just announced a conceptual new set of lamps that can not only adapt their light distribution to cater to the environment, but can project high-res visual aids onto the road ahead, such as makeshift zebra crossings for nearby pedestrians. The new system is dubbed Digital Light and features two million pixels that, with the help of algorithms and sensors that analyze the vehicle's surroundings, can each adjust their individual brightness depending on the scenario. An example of this might be a partial dimming to avoid blinding a cyclist. We have seen this kind of adaptive lighting technology before in systems developed by Fraunhofer and indeed Mercedes itself, although tuning it to control millions of pixels individually does appear to be new territory. But where the Digital Light system gets quite interesting is with the ability to project different objects onto the road. Imagine you are rolling up to an intersection in a foreign city with unfamiliar streets signs and the car, having collected the necessary information, projects a stop sign onto the road out ahead. Perhaps just as practical is the ability to shoot out strips of light that represent the precise width of the car, which could be pretty hand just as you try to squeeze through that extremely narrow gap. For what it's worth, Mercedes says it has already fitted it to a number of demo vehicles and reckons it will be on the road "in the near future."

Comments

Fart

[sexconker]

I farted. I demoed this to people in the office, and they were quite excited. You'll be able to experience it yourself "in the near future".

(This kind of shit is stupid and won't be around "in the near future". The regulations for headlights alone would take years to rewrite and grease through. Further, nobody wants to see the projections from a car other than their own, least of all cyclists and pedestrians. It's bad enough when some jackass has illegal HID lamps that are misaligned so they blind you and are that ugly blue color so the last thing you see is just fucking awful. The only sane way to do this shit is to do it on the windshield as a head-up display for the driver.)