Just one data point from Germany: The legal situation currently makes it illegal to use arbitrary lightning signals in motorized traffic. This has many clear reasons, such as reducing stress and distraction and reserving blue warning lights to emergency vehicles, for instance.
Given how traditional and cautious Germany is when it comes to new technology, I could imagine that projecting cars have a long way until getting recognized. On the other hand, Germany thinks of itself as a automotive country. Car manufactures have a lot of influence in politics.
Somewhat related, CitiBike trialed a setup that projected a bike symbol ahead of the bike. It wasn’t rolled out widely, but I remember thinking that it was a good system on the few occasions I happened to get one of the pilot bikes.
The TfL hire bikes in London (Boris Bikes) have this. They don't seem great, it's just some faint green laser lines on the floor that don't resemble a bike rather than what you see in those photos. If anything they're more confusing for other road users.
Why? There are more reliable means of conveying information. Just because someone figured out they can do this doesn’t mean it is a good idea. The road in front of the driver is an area where the drivers focus should be solely dedicated to being aware of their surroundings. Projecting other symbols only clutters the information that the brain has to process. Status indicators work better in dedicated spaces to reduce cognitive load.
Assuming that the vehicle has empty road in front of them, at night, with sufficient contrast.
Many people drive vehicles during the day, on a road with other vehicles, or other competing lighting sources.
What is better is an indication system that works in all conditions, rather than requiring the driver to look different places under different scenarios.
Indicator lamps placed high upon a dashboard work in 100% of driving conditions and also allows the driver to remain looking in the correct direction.
The only thing they lack is marketing gee-whiz favor.
Why not use a heads-up display on the windscreen? Some automakers already do this and it should avoid most of the concerns around projecting outside the vehicle.
Why on earth would you project this onto the actual road instead of just some HUD for the driver?
This whole thing seems like an absolutely insane idea to me from the get-go but the comments in here seem to really like the idea. I can't think of anything worse than light-projection systems from cars onto the real world for almost anything.
The only one I'm onboard with is something more visually indicating that a car is backing up. Plenty of vehicles have audio cues so a visual one makes sense to me.
But ideas that cars should project a warning to pedestrians that a car is going to turn blows my mind. How about you warn the operator that they might kill someone?
Yeah a block of light in front of the car which overlaps with the lane merge projection from grandpa who left his blinker on conflicting with someone's navigation projection who needs to be in the right lane yesterday conflicting with someone's broken projection for pedestrians on a stroad sounds like a fucking hellscape.
People can't use blinkers correctly or keep their headlights and tailights in working order. I'm sure expensive light projections that link with software and a onboard computer that was out of date the day it was made is going to work splendidly.
Cars already have mandatory lighted equipment to warn that they are going to turn, but too many operators seem to forget how that's supposed to work. I can't imagine how drivers are going to figure out how to communicate more complicated information if they can't remember how to use a little lever.
I could see projecting information that's useful to other drivers and pedestrians.
A rectangle indicating your stopping distance would be useful for cars intending to merge in.
A turn signal that is projected forward would tell people entering a cross-walk "there is a car trying to turn across this, watch out for them and make eye-contact".
A rear-projection rectangle would indicate a car is in reverse and may back up without seeing you.
The problem with all of these, and any other information is that they really only work at night, so...
I partially agree. I think this system is useful, but only for very simple spatial data. Having the car project a line one car length ahead and flashing bars synced with the indicators would be a major improvement over a standard unagumented view; however once you start trying to be fancy with symbols, letters, and numbers I feel any improvement in spatial awareness would be canceled out by the extra cognitive power needed to parse those symbols combined with the extreme clutter created by every other car on the road doing the same thing
I was initially very much against the idea, but this comment kinda put me in a 'maybe not a bad idea' camp. Naturally, the stuff will soon be hacked to project all sorts of other things, but that is, for better or worse, standard human behavior.
> A rectangle indicating your stopping distance would be useful for cars intending to merge in.
> The problem with all of these, and any other information is that they really only work at night, so...
Nah, the real problem in my experience is people don't care. It's rare for people to even give me half of the distance they should when they merge. The full distance? That would be a miracle. It's hard for me to give the full distance. People just start passing me on my right even when I have my signal on.
Does anyone know why we don't use audio for this sort of thing? Do we? I might have just missed it, not a driver.
I am aware of navigation/GPS of course but I mean for these sort of snippets of road info. The only non-GPS audio info I've heard is the bleeps in some cars that say there's a speed camera coming up.
Car: "40"
Brain: Aight speed limit is 40 now.
Car: "Give way"
Brain: I need to yield at the next junction.
It could even auto-pause if you're applying brakes or indicating / turning the wheel to avoid distracting you.
I know (or at least media has told me) that airplanes do use audio for this sort of info, wondering why it never made it to cars.
E: lol doubt I'll get a response, for some reason this post went from #2 to like #50
That would be one hell of a projection if it is visible to where I'm looking in the road. I'm not looking at the road immediately in front of me. I'm looking well ahead just as taught while learning to drive.
The proper look ahead distance varies based upon speed. When performing low speed maneuvers, a driver will need to look at the area immediately in front of their vehicle.
Yeah nothing is more annoying than touch screen inputs while driving. Even my porsche has an obvious input lag and the touch screen is rather low quality. German cars aren't particularly great when it comes to electronics let alone touch screens.
Even without input lag, having to look at a screen to press a button is much more distracting than a physical button that can be found without looking.
I don't understand how they call a head-up display a premium feature and then continue to describe matrix-led-projection headlights that are only on the high end models of premium German brands.
Head-up displays are available in a relatively mid-range BMW 3 series from over 10 years ago. It's an option you have to pay for, but so will these lights be.
That may sound weird, but it's actually off-the-shelf tech for a couple of decades now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Light_Processing It's already the most common projector technology, not something new they're developing just for this.
1.3 million mirrors is actually low-resolution by modern standards.
Yes and no. I believe this technology is an extension of selective darkening headlights.
Essentially, a camera system can detect surrounding vehicles and selectively darken the lighting around them. It means you could effectively always run your high-beams since the vehicles around you won't be blinded.
'79 Lincoln TownCar did that with a single photocell, worked about 80% of the time. The tech is there and it's not expensive and I'd say could easily be improved with multiple low cost sensors.
Depends on the system. The older ones that are still most common are just screens facing up in the dash that reflect off the windshield. They are also nearly 100% blocked during the day for anyone wearing polarized sunglasses, which limits their usefulness. Newer HUDs use lasers and work with polarized glasses, but of course they are a more complicated, expensive technology.
Head-up displays are available in a relatively mid-range BMW 3 series from over 10 years ago.
Heads-up displays were available in cars at least as far back as the 1990's. Perhaps earlier.
These days, you can get an app for your smartphone that doe the same thing. You just velcro the phone to your dashboard under the windshield and the backwards HUD is reflected in the glass.
So we have some cars that rely on visual information for self-driving.
And we have some cars that can project onto the landscape, modifying visual information.
What could go wrong!
I only have a Volvo, in the UK, and it has one of those systems that tell you the last road sign that it has seen. That information then can optionally control warnings, speed limiter, etc. I typically do use the speed limiter, it works well... until I was behind a car that had a 20mph bumper sticker on the back. Then my car kept insisting that 20mph was the speed limit. I was on a motorway.
Plot for a future novel: Project light onto surfaces from a moving vehicle to make another car behave in a way that kills the occupants. No evidence can be found at the scene as to why the car killed the occupants.
For the novel, probably neither of the above is recorded in high enough resolution.
Thinking of subliminal messages inserted into old movies here, just flashing something up for a hundredth of a second, doing it enough that a system detects something... but not enough that video filmed at 30fps really shows it, and that telemetry doesn't really capture it.
All the telemetry would show is "car thought X", and the video would appear to be clean. What isn't known from is "why" car thought something.
That's a shame, I was thinking a modern Crow Road (Iain Banks) with it being an accident that only later you pieced together that a person was in fact a suspect because they'd had these skills and could've done this far out thing.
Humans also rely on visual information for driving and can easily be tricked. For instance, I don't think there is any security mechanism to prevent the placement of a battery powered green light on top of a red traffic light. In that case, an autonomous car's logs could actually help in discovering the tampering.
No, but the reason there are three (at least) lights is that the designers were well aware that colorblindness exists and the position of the light is also significant.
I am actually slightly surprised that road signs haven't been updated to include something like a "barcode" or similar that would make it very easy for the machine to identify what sign it is. You could "paint" over the entire sign with a variation in the infra-red reflectivity with a QR code, for example.
Then the computer would be better at recognizing a sign than a human.
One advantage of something machine-readable, like a QR code, would be to incorporate additional information (more than could be easily consumed by a human).
For example, a speed limit sign could include the name of the road it controls, which would help reduce instances of cars suddenly slowing to 35 mph on the freeway when passing a sign on the frontage road.
It might also be useful for cases of (this is US-centric) yellow "advisory" speeds posted for, e.g., sharp curves. The machine-readable aspect might indicate how long the advisory speed applies (next 1000 ft) and why (sharp curve, hidden intersection, etc.)
> That way even faking or destroying sign would be ineffective
In theory you could add an HMAC (or similar) signature to the QR code. It would be bigger, but if cars maintained a DB of state DOT public keys, you could mitigate this somewhat.
Then you’d also have to worry about duplicate codes, but at least they wouldn’t be “fake”. Maybe even add lat/long coordinates to the code… again, more data, more pixels required, but it would make sure the signs are roughly in the right place. Which doesn’t seem all that feasible to require construction crews to put the right sign in the right place.
Logistically this doesn’t seem all that promising.
It's true that people aren't often looking for fatal pranks, but you could do more benign like try to get people pulled over by causing them to speed unknowingly.
Yes. Railroad tracks in the middle of nowhere are usually freely accessible. Why bother putting a fence if no one's around? Even at railroad crossings in cities, one could cause a some collateral damage by welding it right next to the crossing.
There are lots of tools, weapons, chemicals, and other things that a person could do that would be bad. It doesn't take much creativity, just a callous disregard for other people. But in contrast to the fearmongering and crime you'll see in the media, consider it a bit of good news that in spite of how incredibly easy it is to intentionally cause harm to someone else, billions and billions of people choose not to do that every single hour of every single day.
I mean, you now have told a lot of people that you can just get a tool to derail a train easily, that I'd guess most (I didn't) don't even know it exists.
I think that's GP's point: derailing a train is just a search engine away, and that's only scary when we think about it, which we almost never do.
Which in turn is because our emotions around people setting out to do that, are calibrated around the fact that it basically doesn't happen outside of war conditions.
I googled how to do it just for lulz and got youtube video with someone showing one... and some russian/ukrainian looking name in comments asking about it and asking where to get one, from like a month ago
I wonder whether it's related. Probably not but train derailments are weirdly relevant to current world state...
But back to the topic... I don't think anything should be censored and am of opinion freedom of speech just need to be taken wholecloth, good with the bad, but you gotta wonder how much easier it is now.
You don’t even need to weld it, you just need to leave it somewhere in the way and striking it at sufficient speed will result it in bludgeoning through a car or worse.
AFAIK, at least in Russia there are signaling systems that will interpret a metal object connecting the rails as "another train is on the track" and inform the train driver.
Not sure whether those systems are also installed in the wilderness though. But it seems kinda likely that anybody thinking "I should derail a train for fun" might not bother driving into the wilderness when there's an alluring, convenient, seemingly unobserved stretch of the railway available nearby.
Edit: another thing that comes to mind is that you'd also have to find a low-visibility part of the railway, even in the wilderness — because otherwise the driver will just notice the obstacle and stop the train.
Because not all cars are self-driving or have the ability to access this hypothetical database. That will remain the case for likely the next 30 or more years.
Right, but the cars that are scanning signs and will have the ability to read said code are the ones being suggested that they should consult this database to avoid errors. If they're consulting it to avoid errors, they could just use it directly
Now you have two sources of truth for autonomous and non-autonomous cars. You end up with two groups playing the same game by different rules on the same board simultaneously.
Whether or not that's a problem in practice is not clear to me. Among others, taxis, construction vehicles, emergency vehicles, garbage and delivery trucks, municipal busses, school buses, bicycles, motorcycles, and vehicles in funeral processions all play by different rules than the average motorist.
This mostly doesn't cause disasters. Of course they're visibly different for the most part and make up a comparatively small percentage of traffic.
Ride hailing vehicles might be an interesting point of comparison: they're visibly similar to normal vehicles, comparatively common, and play by something resembling taxi rules.
Back in the late 2000’s I wanted to start a company that broadcasted the current speed limit near signs. Like a BT beacon, sorta, but obvs not BT. It turns out this requires too much coordination. Specifying a protocol, getting manufacturers to build it in, lawmakers to pay for it, sign makers to embed it, etc.
Good point. Also, M25 (London orbital motorway) has large sections with variable speed limit. Google maps navigation just doesn't show a limit for those areas, since it does not have timely data.
Also the 20mph boroughs really confuse the systems (cars and satnav), since they very often say 30 in 20 and also 20 in a 30. The various limits are, admittedly, not well signed, and I suspect that's deliberate to keep drivers cautious.
One problem is "map matching". That is, given your lat/lng (or, more realistically, a time-series of lat/lngs) and a map, figure out which road you're on.
The thing is that most consumer devices with GPS (like phones and even standalone GPS navigators) have a lot of internal "magic" to hide the raw noise in location fixes from the GPS signal.
For example, certain Garmin devices (intended to be used off road) will snap your location to an Interstate if you are going more than 55 mph and heading roughly in the direction of the road (which is evident when you run into traffic and your location keeps switching between the frontage road and expressway--the error distribution of the noise doesn't have mean=0!).
Basically, they haven't, or at least they hadn't 4 years ago when the car I have with it was made.
Diving along a free flowing 50 and having it decide it's now a 30 because it saw a sideroad and drop a gear is semi-regular. The second most dangerous thing it does after having a touchscreen.
It also manages to read 45 sometimes but I have literally never seen a 45 sign.
Our prototype just screwed onto the sign post and could be aimed that way. We never added it to the prototype, but having an accelerometer added to detect movement and shutting down/calling home would help with damage or vandalism.
Or they could have something like an IR beacon, that way cars can recognize them without relying on computer vision and nothing that looks like a road sign can confuse the system.
First, display an uproad pattern crafted to cause a buffer overflow. 0wn the autpilot, trash recording. Bonus points for taking over the entertainment system, cueing Death Grips "Guillotine" at max volume as the car leaves the road.
> Plot for a future novel: Project light onto surfaces from a moving vehicle to make another car behave in a way that kills the occupants. No evidence can be found at the scene as to why the car killed the occupants.
Most interesting to think about are the stickers[1] that look random but actually trigger some kind of adversarial behaviour, a bit like how tiny human-imperceptible changes to an image can completely flip an image categorisation network's guess.
Perhaps most fun to think about in a Dan Brown-style NSA capabilities combined with Peter Watts' Blindsight's near-total-imformation perceptual-cognitive shenanigans kind of way.
I was actually on a 40mph road earlier today when I passed a side street with a 20mph sign that had been rotated to face the main road. My car was then insisting it was 20 for the rest of the road.
>Plot for a future novel: Project light onto surfaces from a moving vehicle to make another car behave in a way that kills the occupants. No evidence can be found at the scene as to why the car killed the occupants.
Problem with this is that self-driving cars like teslas will probably have cameras all over them
Isn't there a an odd effect where people are drawn towards what they're looking at while in motion?
I'm not sure I'd be a fan of plopping something unusual on the road in front of me if there's other lanes. I'm picturing some random rubbernecker sending me flying off the road because my car decided to project a raincloud in front of me.
Target fixation is apparently how many motorcyclists crash. They see the tree and then ride directly into it. The first thing they teach a rider is looking where you need to go. It doesn't come naturally at first, because it often means you're not looking in front of the bike, and have to trust physics will do its thing. That body-bike connection needs to develop over time and become instinctual, the mind needs to be taking out of the equation. It really takes time. That's why it's often a horrible idea to start learning to ride well into adulthood, it's harder to learn these embodied habits.
No. The road is a shared space and it should be respected as such. We already need to reduce the lumens on headlights. And probably take out "hi-beams" altogether. Seriously, I've never been in a situation where it's made a difference worth talking about. In over 20 years of driving, I can count on one hand the number of times I've intentionally turned on my hi-beams. And it was mostly to see if it would help. It did not.
In over 20 years of driving, even in rural areas with lots of deer and other critters, I can count on one hand the number of times I've intentionally turned on my hi-beams.
If your night vision is that bad, the solution isn't to blind other drivers by turning the road into the midday sun.
You're absolutely in the minority here. Perhaps you have extremely above average peripheral vision.
I grew up in a rural area and still visit quite often. Deer jump out in front of cars all the time. It is physically impossible for me, any of my family members, or anyone I've ever known in this town to be able to see the deer off the side of the wooded areas without high beams on. High beams are not going away.
This seems so ridiculous, I almost think you're deliberately trolling. All one needs to do is drive through a dark forest at night, flip on the high beams and instantly see another 200 feet ahead of you, giving you more time to see deer, fallen trees, etc. It's not about bad vision. Even the human with the best eyesight can't see in the dark. And to be clear, this is done when there aren't other drivers coming toward you.
Low beams give you around 200 feet. Which is within the stopping distance of 50mph. If you are in a situation where you are concerned about fallen trees, why are you driving faster?
To also be clear, way more people are driving with high beams or insane lumens just everywhere. My mirrors are practically useless at night because there's always some idiot with their highs on shining right in them.
The benefits of the few cases where you could use high beams are outweighed by all the times they are used inappropriately and cause way more issues.
The serious problem are the drivers who can't fathom not having ultra-high lumen LED headlights switched to high at all times. This is not a subjective thing. It only takes one jackass, so it's easy to see the difference between them and other vehicles.
And it's not like I'm the only one who has noticed this problem:
This is _complete_ nonsense. I'm going to guess that you are an American living somewhere with probably quite wide and straight roads.
Here in the UK, high beam headlights are largely essential on a lot of dark rural/country roads for a number of reasons — uneven road surfaces, soft verges, roaming animals and pedestrians in unlit areas, sudden turns or changes of camber. When used properly, they are an important safety device and they absolutely have a place on a vehicle.
>This is _complete_ nonsense. I'm going to guess that you are an American living somewhere with probably quite wide and straight roads.
I'd wager it's more likely he drives hazardously slow so the extra couple seconds viewing distance don't help him personally or there's always street lighting where he drives.
Edit: based on his commentary elsewhere it's almost certainly the former.
I drive to the conditions of the road. If the road is potentially hazardous, you should slow down. How is 50mph "hazardously slow" when speed limits on these sorts of roads are around 55mph?
And I only chose 50 because it is definitely within the full stopping distance.
I'm not saying this as someone who drives particularly fast. I'm saying this as someone who drives agricultural equipment that literally can't go prevailing traffic speeds. There becomes a point where you are the hazard, not them.
50 in a 55 is probably fine but "I never feel the need to use my high beams despite living somewhere rural" (I'm paraphrasing here) raises massive flags for "grandma, maybe you need to stop driving at night" type behavior and if you don't see this then that is an ever bigger red flag.
Like I already said, I picked a speed that completely falls within the stopping distance. So people couldn't claim they need it because they need to see an extra 200 feet to make up for the 25 or so in stopping distance.
Also, wouldn't the opposite be true? If I feel fine driving with my lows on all the time because I can see fine, then my vision is still acceptable. Whereas if one needs 50,000 lumen ultra-high intensity high beams to travel down a well-lit boulevard, maybe those people shouldn't be driving at night.
Well, I'm an American that grew up in very rural (out in the sticks) part of the country. Not sure if this translates to UK/EU, but we have roads known as farm-to-market roads that are typically 2-lane (one in each direction) that are typically decent quality. In certain areas, the speed limit can be 85mph on these roads, but more typically not higher than 65mph. These are also typically not well lit if at all, so high beams are very important, but typically, drivers are definitely overdriving their headlights. These roads are usually pretty straight except for when they have to bend around what used to be someone's property before claimed for the right of way.
Pedestrians are much less of a concern than say deer, cows, or other animals.
It would be good to let cyclists use the road to project onto it the safe margins for passing cyclists, and to photograph the plates of cars that do not observe those margins.
No. We need to remove all the bullshit from cars. No LCDs, no touchscreens, no heads up displays, no blinky flashy beepy distract-o-trons that take the driver's eyes off the road.
Does that distract the driver? Like, as much as all the bing-y beep-y pointless shit that car manufacturers fill the car with?
One of the things I hate about driving the lovely quick silent eco-friendly Renault Zoes we have at work compared to my decidedly not silent or quick 25-year-old Range Rover, is that it's like driving a Fisher-Price Activity Centre. *Constantly* there's something beeping, flashing, lighting up, switching off, chiming, popping up a message on the LCD dashboard that's bigger and brighter than my laptop screen, or otherwise demanding my attention.
The dashboard in my old Landrover has got four gauges, of which the only one I need to care about is the speedometer. Even that that, with the gauge illumination turned off you're either driving at the same speed as everyone else, or if there's no-one else you're driving at an appropriate speed for the conditions. It only beeps if it feels there's something drastically wrong, rather than "oh hey there's another car quite close to you better beep and light up a bunch of stuff so you're not looking at the car that's quite close to you".
The Zoe has a fantastic "eco" button that will allow it to accelerate like a bat with the squits, up to 60mph and then hard limit the speed so the guy behind you who is also trying to overtake the same lorry you've just pulled out to pass gets a nasty surprise. No brake lights no indication that you're not accelerating any more, just WHOOOOSH THUD. Fucking stupid idea.
Make cars simpler. Make them safer, by taking out all the distracting "safety features". Teach people how to drive more safely.
I agree. I think the answer to automotive safety is not more technology or more car. Instead, we need less car and more driver responsibility. Too many people take driving for granted and don't seem aware they're piloting a two-ton death machine through a shared space.
I drive a 28-year-old Saturn with zero gadgets and great rear visibility. I keep my lights on all the time to be seen, but nearly every week somebody tries to change lanes on top of me. I'm not sure if people are relying on their gadgets to tell them I'm in their blind spot, or if they just don't look where they're going, but I'm getting a louder horn before I end up wedged underneath an F250.
> nearly every week somebody tries to change lanes on top of me
I find this comment funny because it's exactly the same complaint my wife has when driving her F-250. "How is it they can't see this fucking massive white truck and still try to merge into me?"
Not long after I started my current job I was driving a literally Fire Engine Red Landrover Defender 110 plastered in high-vis and strobes.
A guy on a motorbike sitting in a side road looked at me, made eye contact, looked away, and then pulled out in front of me when I was about two car lengths away doing 60mph, and wobbled off up the road at about 40mph.
There was a great howling of tyres and sliding of things to the front, and some fine Gaelic words that I do not care to write down or translate.
You forgot the step where the Karens get to screechin' and the legislators get to legislatin' and we wind up with some knee jerk laws that don't really prevent the bad but curtails any development of the good.
Seems as far as an ambient computing approach, heads-up displays (or in the future, google-glass type interfaces) make more sense cause you can update the visuals easily
If you're just projecting onto surfaces seems like it will be slow and complicated to figure out what to project where
Plus I'm not sure it's even the best approach for the user. Like the Terminator in the movies had little bits of info overlayed on what he saw in his visual signals .. if this info was projected onto floors, walls, roads it would be confusing
This article makes claims without any evidence. I assume they are just repeating marketing copy from Ford et al. In what world would projected symbols from passing cars help pedestrians? Turn signals maybe but the given example of warning surrounding pedestrians about slippery surfaces is laughable.
And then there’s this line: “Touchscreens were intended to reduce the level of distraction”. If anyone actually ever said that, then they were just lying.
I don't think we should allow half the headlights that are currently in circulation. Once we get height and brightness levels under control, we can talk about extras.
In my experience, factory-installed headlights are rarely problematic. The primary offenders here seem to be after-market headlight additions. People purchase and install whatever their local auto parts store has that is bigger and brighter, and rarely take the time to properly align the headlights after the upgrade. This results in light being thrown much farther and wider than it ought to be.
Around here essentially all car lights are regulated. This mostly helps with people installing such crap.
Though I once discovered the inverse issue at the rear end of the car in front of me: Whoever thought a brake light should be a faint, red glimmer in completely black-tinted plastic (that's impossible to see from a few metres on a cloudy day) is either bonkers or pretty smart: I bet people actually buying these regularly need new ones.
Especially considering that with many modern cars, standing behind them at a traffic light and basking in the red brake lights feels like going to an adult club.
(Luckily I have radar with emergency brake assist, so except for the sound of me cursing to myself not a lot happened on the occasion).
Why let users get away with only paying once? Need to make it a subscription to capture that recurrent value stream. Make sure to communicate the price in coffees, the standard unit of nickel-and-diming. I'd drown in all those "just one" coffees companies would like me to buy
I for one can't wait to have direction arrows burned into my retinas by all the half wrecked and lifted vehicles that today do so with plain ol boring shapeless white light.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 229 ms ] threadGiven how traditional and cautious Germany is when it comes to new technology, I could imagine that projecting cars have a long way until getting recognized. On the other hand, Germany thinks of itself as a automotive country. Car manufactures have a lot of influence in politics.
https://www.6sqft.com/citi-bike-to-add-laserlight-projection...
...now if they could equip the bikes with cameras to issue tickets to all the people who park in our bike lanes, THAT would be cool.
Many people drive vehicles during the day, on a road with other vehicles, or other competing lighting sources.
What is better is an indication system that works in all conditions, rather than requiring the driver to look different places under different scenarios.
Indicator lamps placed high upon a dashboard work in 100% of driving conditions and also allows the driver to remain looking in the correct direction.
The only thing they lack is marketing gee-whiz favor.
I had a 90s Cadillac that had a FLIR HUD display. It was a little gimmicky but pretty cool and better than polluting the surroundings.
Cars aren’t always alone on rural roads at night like the pics in the article.
This whole thing seems like an absolutely insane idea to me from the get-go but the comments in here seem to really like the idea. I can't think of anything worse than light-projection systems from cars onto the real world for almost anything.
The only one I'm onboard with is something more visually indicating that a car is backing up. Plenty of vehicles have audio cues so a visual one makes sense to me.
But ideas that cars should project a warning to pedestrians that a car is going to turn blows my mind. How about you warn the operator that they might kill someone?
And as many wrecks I have seen involving idiots invading safe stopping distances, this is a good idea, if they could make it work well in daytime.
Personally, this looks like it will just add additional visual pollution to an already visually polluted landscape.
People can't use blinkers correctly or keep their headlights and tailights in working order. I'm sure expensive light projections that link with software and a onboard computer that was out of date the day it was made is going to work splendidly.
>involving idiots invading safe stopping distances
What makes you think this will stop them?
A rectangle indicating your stopping distance would be useful for cars intending to merge in.
A turn signal that is projected forward would tell people entering a cross-walk "there is a car trying to turn across this, watch out for them and make eye-contact".
A rear-projection rectangle would indicate a car is in reverse and may back up without seeing you.
The problem with all of these, and any other information is that they really only work at night, so...
I'd love to see info "the car in front of me will be taking right soon, or exact speed just displayed via HUD on top of the car.
> The problem with all of these, and any other information is that they really only work at night, so...
Nah, the real problem in my experience is people don't care. It's rare for people to even give me half of the distance they should when they merge. The full distance? That would be a miracle. It's hard for me to give the full distance. People just start passing me on my right even when I have my signal on.
I am aware of navigation/GPS of course but I mean for these sort of snippets of road info. The only non-GPS audio info I've heard is the bleeps in some cars that say there's a speed camera coming up.
Car: "40"
Brain: Aight speed limit is 40 now.
Car: "Give way"
Brain: I need to yield at the next junction.
It could even auto-pause if you're applying brakes or indicating / turning the wheel to avoid distracting you.
I know (or at least media has told me) that airplanes do use audio for this sort of info, wondering why it never made it to cars.
E: lol doubt I'll get a response, for some reason this post went from #2 to like #50
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3EuP7vZRSo
Uhm, what???
Head-up displays are available in a relatively mid-range BMW 3 series from over 10 years ago. It's an option you have to pay for, but so will these lights be.
1.3 million mirrors is actually low-resolution by modern standards.
[1] https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/dlp1.htm
Essentially, a camera system can detect surrounding vehicles and selectively darken the lighting around them. It means you could effectively always run your high-beams since the vehicles around you won't be blinded.
Heads-up displays were available in cars at least as far back as the 1990's. Perhaps earlier.
These days, you can get an app for your smartphone that doe the same thing. You just velcro the phone to your dashboard under the windshield and the backwards HUD is reflected in the glass.
So we have some cars that rely on visual information for self-driving.
And we have some cars that can project onto the landscape, modifying visual information.
What could go wrong!
I only have a Volvo, in the UK, and it has one of those systems that tell you the last road sign that it has seen. That information then can optionally control warnings, speed limiter, etc. I typically do use the speed limiter, it works well... until I was behind a car that had a 20mph bumper sticker on the back. Then my car kept insisting that 20mph was the speed limit. I was on a motorway.
I also think of that Tesla stop light truck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ch7CJEQ2kz0 , and this https://uk.motor1.com/news/449020/video-tesla-model-3-traffi... , and this https://techxplore.com/news/2020-02-road-self-driving-car-hi...
Plot for a future novel: Project light onto surfaces from a moving vehicle to make another car behave in a way that kills the occupants. No evidence can be found at the scene as to why the car killed the occupants.
I wouldn't bet on "no evidence" for the autonomous vehicle. It may record telemetry and video.
For the novel, probably neither of the above is recorded in high enough resolution.
Thinking of subliminal messages inserted into old movies here, just flashing something up for a hundredth of a second, doing it enough that a system detects something... but not enough that video filmed at 30fps really shows it, and that telemetry doesn't really capture it.
All the telemetry would show is "car thought X", and the video would appear to be clean. What isn't known from is "why" car thought something.
Could have both color and shape. Make red hexagon, yellow square for example. or really any recognizable shape
Then the computer would be better at recognizing a sign than a human.
For example, a speed limit sign could include the name of the road it controls, which would help reduce instances of cars suddenly slowing to 35 mph on the freeway when passing a sign on the frontage road.
It might also be useful for cases of (this is US-centric) yellow "advisory" speeds posted for, e.g., sharp curves. The machine-readable aspect might indicate how long the advisory speed applies (next 1000 ft) and why (sharp curve, hidden intersection, etc.)
That way even faking or destroying sign would be ineffective.
Would have to be updated during temporary situations (roadwork etc) tho
In theory you could add an HMAC (or similar) signature to the QR code. It would be bigger, but if cars maintained a DB of state DOT public keys, you could mitigate this somewhat.
Then you’d also have to worry about duplicate codes, but at least they wouldn’t be “fake”. Maybe even add lat/long coordinates to the code… again, more data, more pixels required, but it would make sure the signs are roughly in the right place. Which doesn’t seem all that feasible to require construction crews to put the right sign in the right place.
Logistically this doesn’t seem all that promising.
Given the phone's camera, compass and GPS, validating that the sign has been installed as specified (location, facing direction) is almost trivial.
It's true that people aren't often looking for fatal pranks, but you could do more benign like try to get people pulled over by causing them to speed unknowingly.
https://westernsafety.com/nolan-portable-derail-pd-2/
On sale now! Or pick this one for bigger and faster trains:
https://www.aldonco.com/store/c/127-SaberTooth-Portable-Dera...
There are lots of tools, weapons, chemicals, and other things that a person could do that would be bad. It doesn't take much creativity, just a callous disregard for other people. But in contrast to the fearmongering and crime you'll see in the media, consider it a bit of good news that in spite of how incredibly easy it is to intentionally cause harm to someone else, billions and billions of people choose not to do that every single hour of every single day.
Which in turn is because our emotions around people setting out to do that, are calibrated around the fact that it basically doesn't happen outside of war conditions.
https://www.kyivpost.com/russias-war/anti-putin-russian-rebe...
I wonder whether it's related. Probably not but train derailments are weirdly relevant to current world state...
But back to the topic... I don't think anything should be censored and am of opinion freedom of speech just need to be taken wholecloth, good with the bad, but you gotta wonder how much easier it is now.
An improperly stored rail from a maintenance project derailed a NYC subway train in 2017: https://apnews.com/article/a6a01e5928f9478bab0d33f03260870e
https://youtube.com/watch?v=agznZBiK_Bs
Not sure whether those systems are also installed in the wilderness though. But it seems kinda likely that anybody thinking "I should derail a train for fun" might not bother driving into the wilderness when there's an alluring, convenient, seemingly unobserved stretch of the railway available nearby.
Edit: another thing that comes to mind is that you'd also have to find a low-visibility part of the railway, even in the wilderness — because otherwise the driver will just notice the obstacle and stop the train.
Whether or not that's a problem in practice is not clear to me. Among others, taxis, construction vehicles, emergency vehicles, garbage and delivery trucks, municipal busses, school buses, bicycles, motorcycles, and vehicles in funeral processions all play by different rules than the average motorist.
This mostly doesn't cause disasters. Of course they're visibly different for the most part and make up a comparatively small percentage of traffic.
Ride hailing vehicles might be an interesting point of comparison: they're visibly similar to normal vehicles, comparatively common, and play by something resembling taxi rules.
The tech is the easy part.
In my experience, Google just thinks those are traffic jams. I've seen Maps 'know' about road construction speed limits, but it isn't usual.
The thing is that most consumer devices with GPS (like phones and even standalone GPS navigators) have a lot of internal "magic" to hide the raw noise in location fixes from the GPS signal.
For example, certain Garmin devices (intended to be used off road) will snap your location to an Interstate if you are going more than 55 mph and heading roughly in the direction of the road (which is evident when you run into traffic and your location keeps switching between the frontage road and expressway--the error distribution of the noise doesn't have mean=0!).
Diving along a free flowing 50 and having it decide it's now a 30 because it saw a sideroad and drop a gear is semi-regular. The second most dangerous thing it does after having a touchscreen.
It also manages to read 45 sometimes but I have literally never seen a 45 sign.
Aside, well, the video the car recorded...
Perhaps most fun to think about in a Dan Brown-style NSA capabilities combined with Peter Watts' Blindsight's near-total-imformation perceptual-cognitive shenanigans kind of way.
[1]: https://medium.com/self-driving-cars/adversarial-traffic-sig...
>Plot for a future novel: Project light onto surfaces from a moving vehicle to make another car behave in a way that kills the occupants. No evidence can be found at the scene as to why the car killed the occupants.
Problem with this is that self-driving cars like teslas will probably have cameras all over them
I'm not sure I'd be a fan of plopping something unusual on the road in front of me if there's other lanes. I'm picturing some random rubbernecker sending me flying off the road because my car decided to project a raincloud in front of me.
E: target fixation is the term I was after
Sounds like you've never lived in a rural area with lots of deer and other critters.
If your night vision is that bad, the solution isn't to blind other drivers by turning the road into the midday sun.
I grew up in a rural area and still visit quite often. Deer jump out in front of cars all the time. It is physically impossible for me, any of my family members, or anyone I've ever known in this town to be able to see the deer off the side of the wooded areas without high beams on. High beams are not going away.
To also be clear, way more people are driving with high beams or insane lumens just everywhere. My mirrors are practically useless at night because there's always some idiot with their highs on shining right in them.
The benefits of the few cases where you could use high beams are outweighed by all the times they are used inappropriately and cause way more issues.
You should see an eye doctor about that. My mother had the same issue and it turned out to be a serious problem.
And it's not like I'm the only one who has noticed this problem:
https://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/story/news/2018/12/20/br...
This is _complete_ nonsense. I'm going to guess that you are an American living somewhere with probably quite wide and straight roads.
Here in the UK, high beam headlights are largely essential on a lot of dark rural/country roads for a number of reasons — uneven road surfaces, soft verges, roaming animals and pedestrians in unlit areas, sudden turns or changes of camber. When used properly, they are an important safety device and they absolutely have a place on a vehicle.
I'd wager it's more likely he drives hazardously slow so the extra couple seconds viewing distance don't help him personally or there's always street lighting where he drives.
Edit: based on his commentary elsewhere it's almost certainly the former.
And I only chose 50 because it is definitely within the full stopping distance.
50 in a 55 is probably fine but "I never feel the need to use my high beams despite living somewhere rural" (I'm paraphrasing here) raises massive flags for "grandma, maybe you need to stop driving at night" type behavior and if you don't see this then that is an ever bigger red flag.
Also, wouldn't the opposite be true? If I feel fine driving with my lows on all the time because I can see fine, then my vision is still acceptable. Whereas if one needs 50,000 lumen ultra-high intensity high beams to travel down a well-lit boulevard, maybe those people shouldn't be driving at night.
Pedestrians are much less of a concern than say deer, cows, or other animals.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2012/oct/2...
There's a bunch of clones on Amazon now
One of the things I hate about driving the lovely quick silent eco-friendly Renault Zoes we have at work compared to my decidedly not silent or quick 25-year-old Range Rover, is that it's like driving a Fisher-Price Activity Centre. *Constantly* there's something beeping, flashing, lighting up, switching off, chiming, popping up a message on the LCD dashboard that's bigger and brighter than my laptop screen, or otherwise demanding my attention.
The dashboard in my old Landrover has got four gauges, of which the only one I need to care about is the speedometer. Even that that, with the gauge illumination turned off you're either driving at the same speed as everyone else, or if there's no-one else you're driving at an appropriate speed for the conditions. It only beeps if it feels there's something drastically wrong, rather than "oh hey there's another car quite close to you better beep and light up a bunch of stuff so you're not looking at the car that's quite close to you".
The Zoe has a fantastic "eco" button that will allow it to accelerate like a bat with the squits, up to 60mph and then hard limit the speed so the guy behind you who is also trying to overtake the same lorry you've just pulled out to pass gets a nasty surprise. No brake lights no indication that you're not accelerating any more, just WHOOOOSH THUD. Fucking stupid idea.
Make cars simpler. Make them safer, by taking out all the distracting "safety features". Teach people how to drive more safely.
I drive a 28-year-old Saturn with zero gadgets and great rear visibility. I keep my lights on all the time to be seen, but nearly every week somebody tries to change lanes on top of me. I'm not sure if people are relying on their gadgets to tell them I'm in their blind spot, or if they just don't look where they're going, but I'm getting a louder horn before I end up wedged underneath an F250.
I find this comment funny because it's exactly the same complaint my wife has when driving her F-250. "How is it they can't see this fucking massive white truck and still try to merge into me?"
A guy on a motorbike sitting in a side road looked at me, made eye contact, looked away, and then pulled out in front of me when I was about two car lengths away doing 60mph, and wobbled off up the road at about 40mph.
There was a great howling of tyres and sliding of things to the front, and some fine Gaelic words that I do not care to write down or translate.
Seeing without seeing.
All it takes is one TikTok video of someone projecting their rap video on the road, and the streets will be awash with them.
Or better yet — Coca Cola delivery trucks projecting Coca Cola ads on the streets in front of them, and behind.
Or supermarket delivery cars projecting the latest specials on the streets for everyone to see.
Or road-spam-as-a-service, where you can rent a car to project your ads on the streets.
Combine it with a little bit of "AI:" Car sees someone walking their dog on the sidewalk, and projects ads for dog food at their feet.
Welcome to the dystopia.
If you're just projecting onto surfaces seems like it will be slow and complicated to figure out what to project where
Plus I'm not sure it's even the best approach for the user. Like the Terminator in the movies had little bits of info overlayed on what he saw in his visual signals .. if this info was projected onto floors, walls, roads it would be confusing
And then there’s this line: “Touchscreens were intended to reduce the level of distraction”. If anyone actually ever said that, then they were just lying.
Though I once discovered the inverse issue at the rear end of the car in front of me: Whoever thought a brake light should be a faint, red glimmer in completely black-tinted plastic (that's impossible to see from a few metres on a cloudy day) is either bonkers or pretty smart: I bet people actually buying these regularly need new ones.
Especially considering that with many modern cars, standing behind them at a traffic light and basking in the red brake lights feels like going to an adult club.
(Luckily I have radar with emergency brake assist, so except for the sound of me cursing to myself not a lot happened on the occasion).