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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.
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.
Who said that "the goal is driverless"?
But if you assume that it is, then for the same reason as the Scenicruiser and railway-car observation domes - rider experience. Allow the rider to enjoy the scenery unimpeded.
But, anyhoo, the cynic in me says that perhaps they would only implement this on driverless cars - because to put it in a car with a driver might prove a liability. What happens if the it fails? Will drivers sue Toyota because they didn't see something that was blocked by the pillar, or if they misperceived the location of something due to some malfunction? (I realize it is mirrors, not cameras and displays - but "malfunction" is still possible - e.g. broken or misaligned mirrors.)
My uncle's 1943 pickup had a small oval window in the back. You don't know what ridiculous is.
*"If the goal is driverless then why worry about field of vision?"
It's done to enable people on the outside to see your new haircut.
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...
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I think that was parent's point. If the mirrors are misaligned, a driver might think that an obstacle was at 10 o'clock, when it was actually at 11 o'clock causing a collision.
However, I don't think that this would be an impediment to put this into cars. In the past 10 years, there's been a proliferation of driver assist capabilities like backup cameras, radar collision detection, etc. All of which, should a 'misalignment' occur, could result in the driver having an accident and we haven't seen a barrage of lawsuits.