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Great, so lasers are very directional and allow you to illuminate the exact area that you are interested in. What I don't agree with is that you can always excl
by yholio 8y ago
Great, so lasers are very directional and allow you to illuminate the exact area that you are interested in. What I don't agree with is that you can always exclude the eyes of the other drivers from that area.
Roads are uneven, you have curves and bumps and ramps. Unless there is an inteligent system actively tracking incoming vehicles and avoiding them, there is always a chance that you will hit someone with the full force of 10x brighter lasers. I know of no such inteligent headlight system, that needs to have close to 100% demonstrated success rate. Blinding the driver of a single bike or tractor is enough to produce a major accident.
The way the headlight arms race is going, I believe there is an opportunity for defensive technology to be invented: a liquid crystal layer in your windshield that, coupled with a camera that tracks your eyes location, is able to reduce the transparency of a very small spot in your field of view that covers the incoming vehicle. Seems like it could be implemented with 80s tech.
- cptskippy 8y agoReading the article and looking at SLD Laser's website leads you to believe that they are shooting lasers out the front of the emitter. They also both implicate the BMW 5 series. BMW demoed a laser headlight system to Jalopnik and it doesn't work that way at all. The lasers are fired into a phosphorous element to excite it into emitting light which is then reflected down field. The advantages of this over LED and other tech is that it uses less power and produces less heat. https://jalopnik.com/how-bmws-new-laser-headlights-will-work-and-not-kill-y-1521586271 https://jalopnik.com/how-bmws-new-laser-headlights-will-work...
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- dekhn 8y agoI assume you know this, but most big leds used in headlights already have phosphorous elements. For example, https://www.amazon.com/Chanzon-6000K-6500K-Intensity-Components-Lighting/dp/B01DBZHUXA https://www.amazon.com/Chanzon-6000K-6500K-Intensity-Compone... is a 100W LED, the yellow is the phosphorous with the LEDs embedded within.
- ricardobeat 8y ago> Unless there is an intelligent system actively tracking oncoming vehicles VW has the tech available since 2017: https://www.volkswagen-newsroom.com/en/dynamic-light-assist-3671 https://www.volkswagen-newsroom.com/en/dynamic-light-assist-... YT videos showing it on the road: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=vw+dynamic+light+assist https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=vw+dynamic+ligh...
- blacksmith_tb 8y agoMy Toyota has automatic highbeams which use the forward camera (which is primarily used for collision avoidance) to theoretically switch off the brights. In practice it doesn't seem to sense oncoming vehicles soon enough (even with my brights off the LED headlights provoke a lot of people to flash their brights at me, until I flash back and leave them sunburnt).