Thursday 29 March 2012

A Little Light Reading

This story today from Autoguide.com is about a rather clever new headlamp system being developed by GM in Europe.It is a matrix system and involves separate LED sections that are controlled individually by computer according to surrounding conditions as determined by a connected camera.

The system has the lights on full-beam for a lot of the time but is alledgedly clever enough to detect other vehicles and not dazzle anyone. I'm all in favour of anything that stops me being dazzled when I look in my rear-view mirror on a motorway at night as German cars other than Opels (ie Audis, BMWs, Mercs and Porsches) all tear along the outside lane with enough light shining forwards to host an evening football match - not that I would advocate playing football on a motorway - unless you're John Terry perhaps.

They have produced a video with some nice music that supposedly shows how it works but it didn't make a lot of sense to me:The bit at the start concerns me a bit where the man plays with the settings to give a light-show. I know that the systems would soon get hacked so that young rappers like Dazzle-Razzle and Bo-Diddly would have their pimped up Chrysler Voyagers annoying everyone in a 3 mile radius. Or should that be 8-mile? - spot the rap reference there proving that I am up with the kids.

The video then goes on to show the lights in action with a few German captions. Apparently "fern" means "distant", "abblen" is to fade out and "matrix" means "matrix".

I still didn't get most of it but it is possibly good news for this chap though:

No comments:

Post a Comment