Bosch develops an intelligent, transparent sun visor

At CES 2020 in Las Vegas Bosch revealed the Virtual Visor, an alternative to the sun visor found in cars today. The invention has already won the Best of Innovation in the CES 2020 Innovation Awards. In a video launching the novel product, engineers say they were struck with the idea after realising the car part had not been updated in almost a century.

Bosch replaced the sun visor with a transparent LCD and then linked it to a facial recognition camera pointing at the driver's face. The system employs artificial intelligence to locate facial features (including eyes, mouth and nose) in order to track shadows as they move across the driver's face. A patented algorithm is then used to pinpoint where the driver's eyes are and selectively block and unblock (darken) sections of the Virtual Visor in real time to prevent blindness.

The hexagonal shape of the LCDs is not an aesthetic choice, but rather one based on solid science, said a company engineer Ryan Todd, who explained that shape of LCDs "is more efficient than square pixels when you consider both the sun and your eyes are round as opposed to squared off. So by having three axes of symmetry as opposed to two, the natural shape of the blacking area is more rounded and the way it appears to move, is more smooth."

Virtual Visor is still under development and Bosch is at CES marketing the concept to original-equipment manufacturers, not aftermarket sellers. If you're wondering whether an entire windshield or side glass could be pixelated as a Virtual Visor, it can't because the system fails to dark, not clear. And even if that problem were solved, its clear transparency isn't likely to ever meet standards for a windshield.

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