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NEWS
GENEVA MOTOR SHOW: BMW night vision
Munich's latest innovation could be a boon for Aussie wildlifeDriving from dusk to dawn without fear of kangaroo strikes might only be a couple of years away if BMW’s latest lighting innovation takes hold.
Due to be unveiled at next month’s Geneva motor show, the latest development of BMW’s Night Vision system will shine a spotlight on errant pedestrians and wandering animals to help drivers safely avoid them.
The third generation of the system, Night Vision will combine an array of infra-red and video cameras with BMW’s new Dynamic Light Spot. The camera feeds will be constantly fed through a sophisticated computer algorithm, which works out whether a hazard is human or animal.
Initially, the car will swivel a high-intensity LED light onto the pedestrian to act as a marker before shining a spot light onto the pedestrians to make sure they’ve been seen by the driver.
From the middle of this year, BMW will add the special animal detection system to find potentially hazardous animals that lurk outside the normal spread of the headlights.
The Night Vision BMWs will have a powerful thermal imaging camera inside the kidney grille, which can determine the difference between humans and animals up to 100 metres away.
Its computers then figure out the risk and will push a real-time video feed of the hazard into the infotainment screen display and a warning symbol (a deer, which BMW can’t change to a kangaroo for Australians) appears on the head-up display, either from the left or the right, depending on where the hazard is.
The car will then use its LED dynamic light spots to repeatedly flash on the animal to draw the driver’s attention to it, and it keeps flashing until the animal is in low-beam range.
For pedestrians, the system then has an added safety feature which gives the driver an acoustic warning, while at the same time preparing the brake assistance system for a crash stop.
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Written byMichael Taylor
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