The bodywork design of each vehicle determines the driver’s visibility, which is reduced due to blind spots. Little by little, vehicles are incorporating different systems to improve the driver’s vision and reach areas that the rearview mirror could not cover. However, it seems that an American teenager, who has already received an award for her idea, has the most effective solution for this issue.
This is, possibly, one of the biggest problems related to driving that technology has yet to overcome. Even though 90% of the information that the driver gets comes through their eyesight, sometimes his/her vision becomes reduced by blind spots.
The design of each vehicle’s body determines the blind areas that, little by little, are getting covered by different systems that the rearview mirror did not reach.
First of all, we have to understand what a blind spot is and why they exist in order to figure out how to fix them. The lack of visibility is an important risk, more so when the most vulnerable users of the road, such as motorcycle riders and cyclists, are the most affected by these blind spots.
Rearview mirrors help mostly rear vision, but they do not really help side vision, which it is determined by the size of the vehicle. As a result, larger vehicles have bigger blind spots, a problem that increases when the mirrors are not well adjusted to the driver’s position.
This is due to geometry. The vision field that the rearview mirrors provide is determined by the straight line coming out of our eyes. It then reflects onto the mirror’s edges and extends backwards. Everything outside of this area becomes invisible for the driver and that is why, sometimes, we must lean forward to make sure that there are no risks when we maneuver.
The solution, a high school project
There is no lack of proposals to find the best solution. The systems to detect the blind spot, called BLIS (Blind Spot Information System), consist of an electronic element that ‘sees’ what the mirror cannot ‘see’, and a processing unit that works alerting the driver.
However, the proposal by young Alaina Gassler has surprised many, not only because of her age, 14, but also due to its originality. It was presented to the contest Broadcom MASTERS, a society and science competition for high school students, under the title “Improving automobile safety by eliminating blind spots”.
Her invention consists of a projection which traces the image that the driver cannot see, since it is blocked by the lateral pillars between the side windows and the windshield, making it ‘invisible’. The system conceived by Gassler has a webcam installed outside of each pillar that transmits images inside thanks to a series of 3D-printed materials.
The main challenge this young student faced was to make sure that her solution would not cause another visibility problem because of the image projection. Being a small space, she managed to do this by using a reflective fabric situated on the pillar that emits the reflected light back to the source of the light, allowing the driver to get a clear image that does not interfere with the rest of the mirrors and that does not bother passengers.
For now, the image quality could be better, but there is a lot of room for improvement in the future. Her award not only got her 25.000 dollars to invest on her research, but also meant a step forward towards the creation of a company that experiments with these active safety systems.