A completely different way that engineers found to use technology is on their headlights. People may ask what is wrong with the headlights of a car. Actually there isn’t anything wrong with the common headlights but engineers at Intel and Carnegie Mellon University created a car headlamp that makes it possible to see through snow and rain through the light that this beam creates. Regular lights shine pixels on light where the rain drops are but in this project they were able to use this beam to create monolithic block of illumination. This is a simple project that has been successfully done in the lab, but for this to function there is needed a lot of processing power and Intel is the one that comes in play. It is supposed to be eliminating a range from 70-80% of the raindrops that are visible, reducing the brightness by 5-6%.
How is works.
This Intel prototype was a joint effort of Intel Labs and Carnegie Mellon University. A DLP projector shines through a beam mirror that is used to split the light and reflects it onto the road. The a camera capture a view of that road and where those water drops are found. These information of raindrops that camera gets, are collected and send to the microprocessor making it possible to eliminate the light those raindrops. Latency of the light is also taken into consideration to calculate the delay during the descend of the raindrops. Other than this there are some colors that are masked, for example the green raindrops and the red ones that are closer than the operating range will not be able to be masked. A picture below shows how this prototype is designed and its different working ranges.
This project isn’t a simple invention of technology. Million of people travel with their automobiles everyday and it is very dangerous driving in rainy days. This piece of technology can make your view up to 80% clearer giving you more time to react in cases of danger.
Here is also a video clip of the See Through Rain Intel’s Project:
Intel Future Headlights project
