
The next generation of mirrors - sanj
http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/dn16585-amazing-mirrors
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lacker
Interesting that US law forbids curved rear view mirrors in cars. Too bad,
those seem very improvable.

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steamboiler
Does anyone know why? Just a wild guess, could it be possible that drivers
might get distracted with too much visual information?

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alecst
The answer to this question can be found here:

<http://forums.projektgerman.com/showthread.php?p=83238>

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russell
One of the comments in the article links to another article on how to adjust
your mirrors so that you dont have blind spots.

<http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~gdguo/driving/BlindSpot.htm>

I hate the convex mirrors because I cant judge distances backing up in tight
spaces.

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iamwil
My first inclination would have been to solve this sort of stuff by digital
manipulation.

But on second thought, once built, it's a static piece of hardware that
essential does a single compose-able image transformation that requires no
processing power--almost like a pre-processor. It just doesn't handle the
requirement if the transformation has to change from moment to moment.

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shiro
Or you can say, these mirrors do calculation by reflecting lights in specific
ways---it's real-time, continuous calculation. Electronic digital circuits
aren't the only way to calculate.

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cool-RR
It's really amazing, does anyone has a link to an explanation of how this
works? does anyone have a theory?

Also: Does the car driver mirror work from just the driver's angle, or from
every angle? It would be amazing if it worked from every angle.

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swombat
They say it in the article... the mirror's curve is calculated to cause the
light to be bounced more than once before being reflected to the viewer - so
it's more like several mirrors, except they're built into a single physical
object that looks like a mirror.

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cool-RR
I read that. I meant an explanation which actually shows how it's built, not
just describing generally its principle of operation.

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Mystalic
Although an amazing feat, it means little if it costs something like $50,000
to produce.

Hope it can become a consumer usable good. For nwo though, there's a lot of
industry uses.

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newt0311
50,000 for the first. $2 for the thousandth? This is where the economies of
scale really shine.

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jsomers
Pun intended?

