Slashdot Mirror
Driving with Night Vision
gub writes "Cadillac DeVille DHS and DTS 2000 models now have available Night Vision, a driver enhancement system giving you an extended view of the road ahead. Infrared technology detects thermal energy of objects beyond the range of your headlamps or hidden behind the glare of oncoming lights. The thermal images are superimposed via a HUD on your windshield. "
People often assume that seeing infrared means seeing heat, and that's just not true. That's the difference between ``near infrared'' and ``far infrared.'' Things that are hot throw off far infrared in the same way that things that are really hot throw off visible light.
The Sony Nightshot camera, and all of those nightvision scopes you can buy on the web for from $200-$3000 are near-IR, which means that they can only see objects that are illuminated by an IR light source, like an IR spotlight, or (sometimes) the ambient IR from the night sky.
Thermal imaging hardware is insanely expensive. I understand that this is because it requires tremendously low temperatures, e.g., liquid nitrogen cooling. The explanation I heard is that, analagous to the way the inside of a camera must be completely dark to pick up light without interference, the inside of a heat imager must be completely cold to pick up heat without interference.
Anyway, I'm not an expert on how thermal imaging works, but I do know that it's not available in any kind of ``cool toy'' price range, so I seriously doubt that's what this car has. It's far more likely that the car has a near-IR CCD camera, and IR headlights.
BTW, almost all CCDs see slightly into near-IR beyond the range of human vision: if you look through any modern camcorder and press the button on a remote control, you'll be able to see the beam.
If you had any idea how many drivers and pedestrians were killed each year by other drivers going too fast...
They're not killed by drivers going to fast, they're killed by drivers going faster than that driver can handle.
High speeds do not cause more accidents. That has been proven. However, high speeds cause the accidents that do occur to have a higher fatality rate.
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Hi,
My parents developed FLIR (night vision) for the military/aerospace in the 70s and 80s; I heard a few stories when I was growing up. One of which, is that during the vietnam war (I believe) the military was experimenting with some active night vision technology for foot soldiers. The way it worked was that they would have a soldier stand up with an infrared lamp flashlight type deal and illuminate in front, and the soldiers in his company would wear special filter glasses. Anyhow, it turns out that asian's can see just slightly more into the infrared than caucasians, such that lamp was visible to some of them. The developers never realized this and the soldiers discovered the hard way. It didn't take them long to realize that it was equivalent to wearing a big flashing sign saying "shoot me". Eventually the soldier's refused to carry the lamp, it took the brass/developers a couple weeks to find out though.
Oh no! Now you can't even hide your *ahem* private endeavours behind the glare of your headlights. Thermal images, really! Reminds me of "R" in TWINE - must be a Y2K glitch!
Sreeram.
Cool device! I'd love to have a car with that thing. Even if it's just for the fun of it. Perhaps now people will stop swearing at drivers who shine their headlights into your face? :-)
Still, a device is just a device... it's meant to help conscientious drivers drive better. But I doubt it would make that much a difference for careless drivers. Nothing can replace human responsibility, IMHO.
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
http://www.cadillac.com/te ch/nightmoves/see/shocked.html
and enjoy!
I sincerely doubt the resolution on this thing would allow you any remote abilities to see "through" materials. The person would have to be standing extremely close to the camera lens for a large enough image to appear on the screen, and if that were the case, you'd probably have just a fraction of a second to watch before you run them over.
I worked with M60-A3 tanks about 11 years ago. They used Termal imaging for the targeting. You could see a rabit at 500 + meters. It could cut thru fog and dust. ( These sights were a major factors to the sucess of the tank battles In Iraq by Nato Forces.) You could even look at a woman and tell if she was on her period. If this is well designed it could greatly enhance driver safety. Then again how long will it be before some people stop using their headlights.
Slashdot readers seem to be missing the poing of this device. It is not to circumvent being blinded by drivers with their brights on but rather it is to allow a driver to see past the range of his headlights, and even his brights, in case there are people or wildlife in the road ahead.
The whole idea is for an early warning system to help prevent collisions with road side tire changers, deer, moose, et cetra.
The small box at the base of the windshiled is not susposed to be your main focus at any point while you are driving.
This system one a Grand Award from Popular Science for The Best of What's New.
A great idea that is well implemeted only wish I could afford it. Perhaps their will be a third party that begins to install the system on any car sometime in the near future.
I did a quick search on altavista and found this article with one picture and here is that piture a little bigger.
A lot of people seem to be confusing night vision and thermal imaging. This system does not replace headlights, and isn't night vision. In other words, it does not magnify the intensity of light electronically and spit it out onto a CRT (although wouldn't it be nice to have no more streetlights or headlights ever! no light pollution, no more having to drive 200 mi. to watch the Leonids). All this is is a simple infra-red (heat sensing) mechanism. It can pick up things that would usually be out of the range of your headlights, provided there is some sort of temperature contrast. Typically, this would be a warm person walking by the side of the road at night, or a deer, or freshly wrecked cars, etc. I guess you could use it to see a really cold person on a hot day too ;) Think "Predator" with his mask on, sans the hydraulic hair and cool breathing noises. Same thing, except from what I have seen they don't colorize the picture so it's all one monochromatic scene with varying tints signifying different heat levels. Living in Los Angeles, this is pretty worthless (Although Jason Priestley might argue), but I'm sure someone, somewhere will benefit from it.
--
"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
I also included some of the other features that most geeks would be interested in (CD-ROM Navigation, ect).
Cadillac DHS Base MSRP $ 44,700*
Individual Options:
- On-Board CD-ROM Based Navigation Display with Bose® 4.0 High Performance Music System Consists of: Six-Disc CD Changer (located in glove box) $ 1,995
- Radio - AM Stereo/FM Stereo, Cassette Tape and MiniDisc, Weatherband, Digital Signal Processing, Radio Data System, & Theftlock; Eight-Speaker Bose® Acoustic System $ 300
- Safety / Security Package Consists of: StabiliTrak, Ultrasonic Rear Parking Assist, Garage Door Opener - 3-Channel Programmable $ 895
- Night Vision $ 1,995
- Adaptive Seats, Driver and Front Passenger $ 995
Destination Charge $ 670Total MSRP $ 51,550*
Speaking of cops, this should do wonders for speeders trying to avoid tickets, since when cops hide, they always have their engines running. This should make it easy to spot them a nice long way off - even before a radar detector would warn you. Of course, unless you are on the highway, you might get a lot of false alarms from patrons in store parking lots, etc...