In rethinking driver safety and comfort, Bosch (
www.bosch.com) is bringing the sun visor — one of the most overlooked interior components — ‘into the spotlight’.
It is reported that sunlight causes twice as many car accidents as any other weather-related condition (due to temporary blindness), yet the traditional sun visor is not equipped to adequately address this safety concern.
At best, it blocks some of the sun from a driver’s eyes — along with some of the driver’s view.
Bosch is offering a solution with its Virtual Visor, a transparent LCD and intuitive camera that replaces the traditional sun visor, using intelligent algorithms to intuitively block the sun’s glare but not the view of the road ahead.
Steffen Berns, president of Bosch Car Multimedia, said: “For most drivers around the world, the visor component as we know it is not enough to avoid hazardous sun glare — especially at dawn and dusk, when the sun can greatly reduce drivers’ vision.
"Some of the simplest innovations make the greatest impact, and Virtual Visor changes the way drivers see the road.”
Virtual Visor links an LCD panel with a driver or occupant-monitoring camera to track the sun’s ‘casted shadow’ on the driver’s face.
The system uses artificial intelligence (AI) to locate the driver within the image (from the driver-facing camera) and to identify shadows on the face.
The algorithm analyses the driver’s view, darkening only the section of the display through which light is hitting the driver’s eyes.
The rest of the display remains transparent, no longer obscuring a large section of the driver’s field of vision.
Jason Zink, technical expert for Bosch in North America (and one of the co-creators of the Virtual Visor), said: “We discovered early in the development that users adjust their traditional sun visors to always cast a shadow on their own eyes.
This realisation was profound in helping simplify the product concept and fuel the design of the technology.”