Smart Headlights

Researchers have devised a system that could make it much safer to drive in the rain at night by reducing the glare of headlights on falling drops of water.

When viewed with a high speed camera, rain appears as discreet droplets of water whose motion can be tracked using a predictive computer algorithm. The headlights consist of arrays of LEDs, which are selectively deactivated to avoid illuminating drops in their path. The net result is a flickering effect that is actually undetectable by the human eye, but cuts down substantially on the distracting glare that can lead to accidents. At low speeds, the system was shown to eliminate 70 to 80 percent of visible rain while sacrificing only 5 to 6 percent of the projected light.