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.

Comments

it's gotten ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:it's gotten ridiculous

[Grishnakh]

That's why you're supposed to have a blind spot and rear cross-traffic warning system.

Seriously, though, my 2015 car also has poorer visibility than older cars I've had, but honestly I don't have much trouble with it. The main problem is the blind spot and also the rear view when backing out, but it's not a problem: my BSM works great when changing lanes, in conjunction with the big side mirrors (these mirrors are larger than any I've ever had, I'm sure), and when backing out I have a rearview camera plus the BSM turns into a RCTA (rear cross-traffic alert), and even warns me if there's pedestrians walking behind me, as well as oncoming cars. It's not foolproof and you still need to be aware of your surroundings of course, but overall with these aids I'm sure I'm safer (esp. when backing up) than in any of the older cars I've driven that had more of a "greenhouse". The thick front pillars are a bit of a problem though, and not currently alleviated by any technology, so I do have to make sure to check extra carefully for pedestrians.

Re:it's gotten ridiculous

[Grishnakh]

Do you want to die when you have a small accident? That's why.

Lots of glass means not so much steel to protect you from side impacts. Airbags in the A-pillars keep you from dying or being maimed in many types of accidents.

Also, these "workarounds" work a lot better than using your eyes. Rearview cameras have fisheye lenses for a much wider field-of-view than you normally have, and they show you what's directly behind the car. Many children are run over every year by their parents or others when backing out of driveways. It's physically impossible to see a child directly behind a car from the driver's seat, even in older cars. And when I'm backing out of tight parking spaces, the radars in my rear bumper can see oncoming traffic that it's physically impossible for me to see from the driver's seat.

Re:it's gotten ridiculous

[Z00L00K]

The reason is that the A-pillar has to be stronger today to cope with crash test requirements. The more sloping windscreens initiated by the hunt for lower aerodynamic drag also contributes to put the A-pillar closer to your eyes.

At the same time many vehicle manufacturers now work on replacing the exterior mirrors with cameras. It's not necessarily a good thing from all perspectives though as it's one more thing that can fail and something that makes the vehicles even more expensive.

Re:it's gotten ridiculous

[Grishnakh]

I disagree about them being more expensive. The cameras they use in cars aren't super-high-res like the ones in modern phones, and are really quite cheap. You can get Chinese backup camera systems on Ebay for under $100 now, and that's including the monitor! The cost to an auto OEM for just a backup camera is going to be a fraction of that. Now go look at how much a replacement rearview mirror (for the sides) costs; they're not that cheap, between the big, complex housing (which also folds in, either manually or powered), plus the glass mirror, plus the heating element (many mirrors now are heated), plus the motors to move it around, etc. Replacing all that with a camera would be a big cost savings, and small LCD screens are pretty cheap these days too. However it hasn't happened yet as the regulatory agencies haven't OKed it, but it's coming. It's also questionable how it'll be done; probably smaller monitors mounted near where today's mirrors are, to ease the transition. But they are really handy; I've driven a family member's minivan that has a camera on the right-side mirror, and when you signal a right turn it shows the image on the dash monitor. It shows a nice view that's a lot better than what I'd see with just the mirror, the main problem is it isn't always-on, and it doesn't integrate that well with the existing mirror (the display is in the middle of the dash, not near the mirror).

As for sloping windscreens, that's nothing new. My 2015 car's windscreen isn't any more sloped than the one on my old 1994 Integra, in fact it seems a little less so, though I haven't directly measured them to compare. It's the airbags in the pillar, plus the greater strength needed for modern crash (rollover) standards.

Flaws in the invention

[hankwang]

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...