Tag Archives: headlights

Volkswagen Created a Motorized Office Chair with Car Features

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Inspired by the features found in its line of vans, Volkswagen Norway created a motorized office chair with all sorts of bells and whistles. The chair’s features include LED headlights, a seatbelt, a seat warmer, a horn, a tow hitch – even an entertainment system. So basically, an office chair that’s even nicer than my car.

The foot-pedal-operated chair has a range of about 7.5-miles and a top speed of just over 12 MPH. It also has a backup camera and proximity sensors and a touchscreen entertainment center with integrated speakers. For reference, my car has a boombox sitting in the passenger seat operated by eight D batteries.

Unfortunately for business executives with corner offices and private bathrooms, the chair isn’t actually going to be sold but was made as a marketing piece to highlight VW’s van features. Which, from what I could gather, aren’t that different than other manufacturers’ van features. Those companies didn’t put them all in an office chair, though, which is why I’m only buying VW from now on. When’s the new microbus coming out anyways?

[via New Atlas]

These Projection Headlamps Shine Moving Images Onto the Road

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While wandering the expansive show floor at the 2019 Tokyo Motor Show, I came across a pretty interesting technology which could someday find its way into vehicles. Basically, it’s a projection system that would allow vehicles to cast moving images onto the ground in front of them.

High tech headlight maker Koito Manufacturing was showing off their Road Projection Lighting system, which is designed to communicate with people in front of your vehicle, as well as to improve safety for the driver. Among the potential use cases for the technology are the ability to display the width of the vehicle for improved navigation through narrow spaces, as well as the ability to indicate the direction in which a pedestrian has been detected in front of the car.

The system could also be used to display information for pedestrians, such as the location of an emergency shelter in the event of a disaster. Of course the most obvious use is also the least useful – displaying cool animated light shows on the road ahead. You can check out a demo video of the technology below:

At this point, the design is still in the prototype stage, but it seems like the safety features could definitely be useful, and someday find their way into a production vehicle.

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Turn your wheels into headlights!

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The entire concept of the Revolights sounds fascinating. A headlamp, and a tail-lamp, within the wheel of your bicycle itself! How it works is even more fascinating. Rather than illuminating your entire wheel as it goes round, the LEDs on the wheel know exactly which position to light up in, giving you the arc shaped light that you see when you’re riding your bike. The lights even adjust to the speed of your bike, so no matter whether you’re slowing down or speeding up, the lights adjust so that they go on and off only at the correct moment in time, maintaining the arc shaped light on the front and back of the bike.

A step up from the first edition of Revolights, these lights, titled the Eclipse+ come with a much better design that elegantly and easily sits on the wheels of your bike. The lights pair with your smartphone via the Revolights app and give you stats like LED battery power, bike speed, distance covered, and even weather alerts (so you can ride well-prepared). The lights are powerful enough to illuminate a 360° area in front of the bike, serving as great head-lights, whereas the tail-lights not only flash when you slow down, they can even help acting as indicators when you turn left or right, flashing in the direction you’re about to turn in, so that people behind you stay clued in. Oh, and since they’re so prone to grabbing eyes and fascinated looks, they also come with a theft-proof design that allows them to be traditionally locked along with your bike!

Designer: Kent Frankovich (Revolights)

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Rear Window Stickers Target Annoying High Beam Abusers

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China isn’t the only place in the world where asshats seem oblivious to how high-beam headlights work. You are supposed to use them only when alone on the roads and shouldn’t shine them directly into the other drivers’ eyes. I’m talking to all of you brodozer drivers out there. In China, using high beam headlights all the time is a big problem.

In fact, it’s become such a huge problem that there are now stickers out there to scare those people behind you with their brights on into turning them off. These highly reflective stickers look like that scary lady that crawls out of the TV in The Ring.

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How’d you like to be driving down a dark road and see this creepy bunch staring you down?

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I also like this one that gets right to the point better simply stating, “Turn off your f*king high beam.”

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[via Mashable]

Carnegie Mellon smart headlight prototype blacks out raindrops for clearer view of the road

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DNP Carnegie Mellon headlight prototype blacks out raindrops for clearer view of the road

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon have developed a prototype smart headlight which blots out individual drops of rain or snow -- improving vision by up to 90 percent. Made with an off-the-shelf Viewsonic DLP projector, a quad-core Intel Core-i7 PC and a GigE Point Grey Flea3 camera, the Rube Goldberg-esque process starts by first imaging raindrops arriving at the top of its view. After this, the signal goes to a processing unit, which uses a predictive theory developed by the team to guess the drops' path to the road. Finally, the projector -- found in the same place as the camera -- uses a beamsplitter like modern digital 3D rigs. Used in tandem with calculations, it transmits a beam with light voids matching the predicted path. The result? It all stops light from hitting the falling particles, with the cumulative process resulting in the illusion of a nearly precipitation-free road view -- at least in the lab. So far, the whole process takes about a hundredth of a second (13 ms) but scientists said that in an actual car and with many more drops, the speed would have to be about ten times quicker. That would allow 90 percent of the light located 13 feet in front of the headlights to pass through, but even at just triple the speed, it would give drivers a 70 percent better view. To see if this tech might have a snowflake's chance of making it out of the lab, go past the break for all the videos.

Continue reading Carnegie Mellon smart headlight prototype blacks out raindrops for clearer view of the road

Carnegie Mellon smart headlight prototype blacks out raindrops for clearer view of the road originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 04 Jul 2012 13:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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