These Headlamps See Past Storms by Shining Light Where the Rain Isn't

When you're driving through a rain or snow storm and you try using your regular headlights or high beams, the light immediately reflects off the falling precipitation back into your face and drastically reduces visibility?hence the advent of low-hanging fog lights. But with these new headlights from Intel and Carnegie Mellon University, both fog lights and rain glare will soon be a thing of the past.

Normal headlights passively produce a big block of light and direct it in front of the car. Whether that light hits an obstacle 400 feet ahead or a raindrop 4 feet ahead is beyond the control of the headlight. Not so with Intel's prototype. This system utilizes a DLP projector light source, shining a beam splitter onto the road ahead. An attached camera records the position of falling precipitation while tracking algorithms identify and follow objects (read: individual raindrops and snow flakes) within the system's operating range. By directing the light source to shine everywhere but the pixels that contain objects, the system can throw light through a storm.

The research's results are quite impressive. ?In the worst thunderstorm, a motorist in a car traveling at around 20 MPH would notice an 80% [visibility] improvement,? John Tomkins, a Intel research engineer, explained. Overall, drivers would see a 70-80 percent reduction in visible precipitation with only about a 5 percent drop in overall lamp brightness. This has the added benefit of reducing the power draw of headlamps by shining smarter rather than trying to overpower the weather conditions with the brute luminance high-drain halogen or xenon bulbs that can (and regularly do) blind oncoming drivers.

But put down your car keys, these headlights aren't at your local Autozone just yet. The system is currently still a bench-sized lab prototype. Good news is the team is hard at work on shrinking it down to fit in standard headlamp housings, bad news is there's no word on when they'll actually do so. [Carnegie Mellon via ExtremeTech - Images: Carnegie Mellon]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/these-headlamps-see-past-storms-by-shining-light-where-486220736

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