Slashdot Mirror
Toyota Patents Cloaking Device To Make Car Pillars Appear Transparent (thedrive.com)
Toyota has patented a cloaking device that aims to make big, chunky car pillars transparent. The "apparatuses and methods for making an object appear transparent" which Toyota just patented uses cleverly placed mirrors to bend light around an object making it visible from the other side. The Drive reports: So you're not really seeing through the pillars, you're seeing around them. This is a much cheaper option than adding more cameras and screens all over the place and much more realistic than Harry Potter's invisibility cloak. The patent was filed with the U.S. patent office by Toyota North America, so if Toyota does go forward with this technology, we can probably expect to see it in cars in the U.S.
If the goal is driverless then why worry about field of vision?
So does this make the Americans or the Japanese the Romulans?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I don't know what it is—maybe a difference between the size of American roads and the size of Japanese roads—but every Toyota I've ever been in is built in such a way as to make it very likely that you'll run over a pedestrian who has just entered the crosswalk.
Every time I approach a 4-way stop or some other intersection in a Toyota, I've got wiggle my head wildly this way and that to make sure I get a good view behind the "pillars". Surely, Toyota has received complaints, and thus Toyota has come up with a solution.
my 2017 car has 12 airbags with 6 in the pillars and all the pillars are as thick as coffee cups and i cant see shit out of any other window but the windshield
Oh the thing that attaches the roof to the car. At first I thought they meant the concrete pillars put up to stop cars from driving into businesses. It would be really dumb for those to be transparent. People on foot run into them enough as is LOL.
The methods they describe are materially the same as prior magicians tricks as well as described in numerous fictional accounts... prior art
Headline should have read:
"Toyota patents physically impossible, unproven, completely non-novel mirror device, just in case competition actually discovers cloaking technology."
I need a cloaking device that keeps other cars, namely police, from seeing my car.
An EMP gun to disable other drivers would be good too.
Unfortunately, the bulky IR sensor for this is at the rear view mirror, blocking a lot of my view. It seems that they needed to add this because they added it.
The key is to have pillar cross-section shorter than the distance between eyes -- voila, can see right through it, without realizing it! I only noticed this effect after I got a new car -- suddenly pillars were an obstacle.
Why not the whole car? Be fun watching the police try to chase a ghost.
and the pillars were ridiculous. It felt like I was boxed in driving the damn thing. The itty bitty windows didn't help either.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
If we only had mirrors / prism / periscopes that wrap the light around the big trucks that I'm driving behind. I'm running through a red light? Oh, now I see, now that I'm in the middle of the intersection. I'm just following this semi-truck at a safe distance. The way the traffic lights are positioned on poles that reach above and into the middle of the lane where I am (Japan) means you have no idea unless you're following way behind.
I'll take credit for the patent, can someone please do this? The cynic in me says it won't happen on the free market because the vehicle in front invests the money but the vehicle behind gets the advantage. But it's certainly technically possible.
so it's gonna be like a gundam cockpit for "daybreakers"?
ass-slow captcha: credited
The left blind spot on my Prius is so bad that doing a shoulder check is almost pointless, I do anyway due to habit, use the mirrors and pray nothing is small enough to hide in that blind spot. The right blind spot isn't as bad, though still anxiety-inducing. I swear I read something recently about similar tech being used to make the car's hood 'transparent'.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
All you need is the external camera(s) and to track where the driver's head is.
Just use a projector to show the correct perspective on the inside.
This is undergrad computer vision at best.
It might be novel but it is also trivial.
"Toyota sued for making car pillars appear transparent."
well this seems innovative but funny at the same times.
The Samsung Safety Truck is doing something similar with camera/screen.
If you look at the front-page figure and Fig. 1 in the patent application, it will become apparent that the device only works for light rays entering at one particular angle. Essentially, it's like looking through louvers with an aspect ratio of 1:4 (fig. 1) or 1:6 (front page), which means that you won't be able to see through at all if your eyes are off by 25 cm horizontal at 1 m distance (i.e., passenger-side pillars) and whatever you see is substantially obscured for smaller angles. This is roughly how those 3M privacy screens for laptops work. That might be barely acceptable for the passenger-side pillars, but would be completely unworkable for the driver-side pillars.
Moreover, the surfaces 126 and 146 in Fig. 2 will need to be polarizing filters or opaque black surfaces so that you don't get to see spurious overlaid images. If you make them black, you will have replaced the obscuration of the pillar by two big black sheets that are only invisible if you look at them from one particular angle. If you make them polarizing absorbers, good luck in manufacturing those such that they don't reflect at grazing-incidence angles. (Those surfaces are mentioned in paragraph 37, without further reasoning about the benefits or tradeoffs, suggesting that the inventors don't know yet how to deal with these issues.)
By the way, the inventors have the polarizations the wrong way around in the figures. Although the correctly mention that p-polarization is transmitted and s-polarization is reflected, they have the arrows indicating the light polarization the wrong way around...
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
I'm pretty sure I read about this technology years ago.... from Jaguar. https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...
No. That's the point. We won't see it.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
So, since this works on mirrors, isn't there prior art from 19th century stage magicians?
Hey Drive, thanks for letting us know it's more realistic than Harry Potter's cloak. Dopes.
And if Toyota does not go forward with this technology, they won't put it in cars in the U.S.
Basically, their cloaking device consists of two or more mirrors, strategically placed so that when you sit in the driver 's seat, and ONLY the driver's seat, you can see what is behind the pillar.
What exactly is patent worthy in this idea, that wasn't discovered 100's of years ago.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I don't think you're supposed to see it...
If I knew putting mirrors facing each other and looking between them at a 45 degree angle was patentable, I would have patented it when I was 7. The only reason Toyota were the first to file this patent was that everyone else thought it was entirely obvious.
Isn't 'done with mirrors' slang for 'it is fake'?
Gravitational lensing. But without a foreground galaxy!