Written by | Ryan Todd
Approximately 95 years ago, sun visors officially appeared in automobiles.
Since then, physical sun-blocking solutions have gradually become standard equipment in vehicles. However, as cars enter the era of electrification and intelligence, suppliers seem to be unsatisfied with this.
Recently at CES 2020, Bosch introduced an electronic sun-blocking solution called “Virtual Visor,” which essentially means a virtual sun visor.
Undoubtedly, the virtual sun visor is a digital sun-blocking solution realized with a transparent LCD screen and a camera as physical components.
The principle is roughly that an RGB camera captures sunlight on the driver’s face to adjust the shadows on the LCD screen, thereby reducing glare, achieving the sun-blocking principle of traditional solid sun visors.
The electronic virtual sun visor maintains at least 90% transparency during operation, which means that the driver can always keep a clear view ahead while driving. Moreover, Bosch revealed that the power consumption of the LCD screen and camera is very low, which does not burden the electrical system.
In the long run, if the sun visor is electronic, it is very likely to eventually integrate with the windshield, or even become part of the glass.
Additionally, according to Bosch, the intelligence of automobiles is the future direction of development, including fatigue detection and vehicle anti-theft, which may also use cameras. Therefore, the camera of the virtual sun visor may share with other devices to reduce the number of components.
The development engineer of the virtual sun visor is Ryan Todd, a Bosch powertrain engineer, who proposed this idea as early as 2016. The inspiration came from a daydream he had while driving about buying a new television for his home—essentially imagining a television screen in front of him while driving, which led him to the idea of using an LCD screen to replace the traditional physical sun visor.【END】
