Bosch has presented a new Virtual Visor technology at CES 2020 in Las Vegas, which the German automotive supplier says is capable of dynamically shielding a driver’s eyes from the sun’s glare.
The Virtual Visor technology uses a driver monitoring camera to track the location of the sun’s casted shadow on a driver or occupant’s face. An AI system then analyzes the vehicle occupant’s view and darkens only a section of a clear LCD panel, which sits in place of a traditional, folded down sun visor. This ensures the sun out of the driver’s eyes, but also allows for the rest of the panel to remain transparent, whereas a traditional sun visor obscures a large section of the driver’s field of vision.
“We discovered early in the development that users adjust their traditional sun visors to always cast a shadow on their own eyes,” explained technical expert for Bosch North America and one of the co-creators of the Virtual Visor, Jason Zink. “This realization was profound in helping simplify the product concept and fuel the design of the technology.”
The transparent visor panel uses a liquid crystal technology to block out a specific area of the panel. The panel is comprised of honeycomb-shaped cells, which fill in one-by-one to make up a larger darkened area that blocks out the sun’s rays.
Bosch has not said if any automakers, such as General Motors, have approached it about putting this new technology in a production vehicle. We may see this tech one day in the future, though, as it earned Bosch a Best of Innovation award during the 2020 CES Innovation Awards, receiving the highest ratings from a panel of judges that included designers, engineers and members of the tech media.
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Comments
Hasn’t NASA developed a helmet lens that does the same thing, at 100 X’s the price!
Or was that just in a movie? 😄
Why not the whole windshield, money is no object!
Make it yourself and get rich offering it for wealthy drivers in luxury vehicles.
Hope they make that frame transparent! And speaking of GM, I wish they would bring back the SHADED WINDSHIELD! the visors are NEVER in the right place,(especially on a windy road) & they aren’t large enough!
Windy road? Roads are solids!
I wondered how long it would take before someone would make a comment on that….I meant ‘winding’ roads….Although some roads have windy straight sections!.lol.
One more thing to drive the cost up and send you into the dealer service dept when it doesn’t work and blinds you.
No thanks.
what about the vanity mirror behind the sun visor ?????
A slight metallic coating on the surface can become totally reflective when the cells are darkened. So this same technology can be a shade and a vanity mirror in a single unit. Illumination could be done with some OLEDs inserted in the frame. My wife would love to have such huge vanity mirrors. She almost decided against buying our 2009 Chevy Equinox because its vanity mirrors are not illuminated!
hamburglar is lovin’ it.
This is stupid. Just another gimmicky piece of technology that makes money for the manufacturers now, and will break within 5 years.
The design of the Bosch visor system would need to be something that would fit in a Ferrari or a Rolls Royce, not just a Silverado. That can likely be accomplished . There are times I could really have used a visor like this.
The LT1 video is excellent from a real owner. As for the spoiler or any ground effect, that can be added via the aftermarket. Other options might cost too much. Front lift and folding mirrors and safety assists are important. Excellent video, though.
The Exhaust system article seemed to cover the subject pretty well and was good for a starter. There should be a lot more information and technology discussed on the exhaust and potential problems and/or improvements in the basic versus the upgrade and after market exhausts, the pros and cons, quirks and features.