DriverSafety
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Samsung announces Drive Link, a car-friendly app with MirrorLink integration
Until self-driving cars become mainstream, it's best to keep eyes on roads and hands off phones. With this in mind, Samsung's debuting Drive Link, an app that balances in-car essentials with driver safety, complete with approval from the no-nonsense Japanese Automotive Manufacturers Association. It's all about the bare essentials -- navigation, hands-free calling and audiotainment from your phone-based files or TuneIn. Destinations can be pulled from S Calendar appointments or texts without trouble, and the text-to-speech feature means you won't miss a message, email or social media update. The best bit is that via MirrorLink, all these goodies can be fed through compatible dash screens and speaker systems. Drive Link is available now through Sammy's app store for Europeans sporting an international Galaxy S III, and will be coming to other ICS handsets "in the near future."
Carnegie Mellon smart headlight prototype blacks out raindrops for clearer view of the road
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon have developed a prototype smart headlight which blots out individual drops of rain or snow -- improving vision by up to 90 percent. Made with an off-the-shelf Viewsonic DLP projector, a quad-core Intel Core-i7 PC and a GigE Point Grey Flea3 camera, the Rube Goldberg-esque process starts by first imaging raindrops arriving at the top of its view. After this, the signal goes to a processing unit, which uses a predictive theory developed by the team to guess the drops' path to the road. Finally, the projector -- found in the same place as the camera -- uses a beamsplitter like modern digital 3D rigs. Used in tandem with calculations, it transmits a beam with light voids matching the predicted path. The result? It all stops light from hitting the falling particles, with the cumulative process resulting in the illusion of a nearly precipitation-free road view -- at least in the lab. So far, the whole process takes about a hundredth of a second (13 ms) but scientists said that in an actual car and with many more drops, the speed would have to be about ten times quicker. That would allow 90 percent of the light located 13 feet in front of the headlights to pass through, but even at just triple the speed, it would give drivers a 70 percent better view. To see if this tech might have a snowflake's chance of making it out of the lab, go past the break for all the videos.
Tobii looks to keep you alert by detecting when you're tweet-driving (video)
Don't think you'll get caught checking the Duke score while cruisin' down the highway? Soon, you may have to think twice before hitting the scoreboard. Tobii has unveiled its new technology that detects drowsiness and distraction in on-board driver safety systems. The platform is based on the company's advanced eye tracking tech to bolster automobile safety on the highways and byways. The system detects eyes of all shapes, sizes, and colors -- without calibration -- even if the driver is wearing glasses or a pair of Ray Ban shades. A constant stream of data communicates to the watchman the driver's condition, regardless of changes in environment or if the person behind the wheel takes a quick peek out the window. Tobii isn't looking to stop here either, as it says eye control of in-cabin infotainment systems is within reach. Perhaps this time next year, we'll be able to browse that Spotify collection with a series of blinks -- one can only hope.
