If you’ve ever driven a car, then you know that all cars have a blindspot and that is the frame at the front corners of the vehicle. This means that if you’re trying to turn a corner, sometimes that frame can get in the way of seeing cars or people, which has the potential to lead to accidents as well.
However, it looks like a 14-year-old teen by the name of Alaina Gassler seems to have fixed that problem by coming up with an ingenious solution. What she did was that she built a prototype system that consists of a webcam and a projector. How it works is that through the webcam, it feeds information to the projector, which in turn projects that feed to the corner of the frame, as you can see in the video above.
This means that essentially you would be seeing “through” the frame of the car on the outside, thus essentially removing the blindspot. She also tested it out with various materials where she ultimately landed on using a reflective fabric. This is because she realized that when not sitting in the driver’s seat, the light from the projector gave her headaches, so by using reflective fabric, only the driver can see what’s going on, while everyone else just sees a black piece of fabric.
That being said, Gassler’s invention isn’t exactly new per se. Modern cars are starting to come with blindspot detection features, but considering her youth and the fact that she can’t even legally drive a car yet, it’s still a pretty impressive achievement.
Filed in . Read more about Cars, Science and Social Hit. Source: mashable