Goodbye to blind spots caused by car pillars

Human inventiveness is an important part of human nature, so it is no surprise that there is a solution for every problem. And if there isn’t one, all it takes is turning the problem over a couple of times to find a way to get around the drawback. Often it seems incredible that it is not the great engineers at the brands who do it, but ordinary, down-to-earth people, with more inventiveness than experience.

This is the case of a 14-year-old girl from West Groove, Pennsylvania, named Alaina Gassler. This young woman was riding in a car with her older brother, who had just got his driving licence, and she noticed that he had trouble seeing properly because of the car’s front pillar. So she thought about how to help him and stop that obstacle from preventing him from seeing clearly.

An invisible pillar

To solve it, she devised a system made up of a webcam that captures the image outside the car and a projector that projects it onto the inside of the right pillar. In this way, the pillar appears not to be there, and from the driver’s seat you can have a complete view of that side of the vehicle.

To fine-tune the image to the shape of the pillar, the young woman added a white cloth to improve the quality of the projection, and using software designed for projecting images, she matched the projection exactly to the specific stretch hidden by the pillar.

To do it, she used electronics materials that can be bought in any store, so she only had to rely on her inventiveness. She then wanted to go a step further and took her invention to the science and engineering competition Broadcom MASTERS (Math, Applied Science, Technology and Engineering for Emerging Stars), where she won a prize of 25,000 dollars, awarded by the Samueli Foundation.

https://youtu.be/HxlNkIwqGb4