Cars are getting smarter every day. Now, they are so smart that they can even beat humans in road safety tests.
However, the inventors have largely ignored the humble sun visor in the cars. The sun visors have been around at least since 1931, when William C Van Dresser patented his visor. The visors even today look largely similar to the early visors. One reason for this could be that the sun visor installed in most cars today does its job very well. It blocks the sunlight when required. However, a sun visor occupies considerable real estate in the car. This real estate can be used for some very interesting applications.
A recent patent discloses a smart sun visor that can potentially transform the currently outdated sun visor into a multi-functional super-duper sun visor of the 21st century. A touch screen device is embedded in the sun visor and has the ability to display different camera views such as ‘See me’ or Selfie view, ‘Polarized Front View’, and ‘Rear Passengers’ view.
A ‘See me’ or Selfie view would allow the users to see themselves on a digital screen on the smart sun visor and would provide the users the ability to take their photos and/or videos and also share those with others on social networking sites.
The ‘Rear Passengers’ view would allow the users to view the passengers sitting in the rear seat of the vehicle on the digital screen of the smart sun visor without having to turn back again and again.
A ‘Polarized front view’ would show the view which is normally blocked by the deployed sun visor, allowing the user to finally view the traffic lights, and road signs without the distraction of glare.
A user would have the ability to take photos and/or videos of any camera views on the smart sun visor and would also be able to view those captured photos or videos later on sun visor’s display screen as well as transmit those photos and videos wirelessly to other electronic devices, cloud storage, and social networking sites.
The smart sun visor has been invented Ankit Kothari, who is a serial inventor. Ankit has setup a company Be Topnotch, LLC, which will be assigned this approved patent (Patent number – 9,457,642) as well as any continuation applications and International PCT applications. The company plans to make the patents available for licensing mainly to the self-driving vehicle manufacturers as well as the traditional automobile manufacturers. Autonomous self-driving vehicles are right around the corner with companies like Google, Tesla, Mercedes, and Uber, aggressively working on them. The company believes that the unique smart sun visor could be very well positioned to be used in such self-driving vehicles as well as the traditional vehicles. The company has worked on this patent for last 3-4 years and they believe that USPTO has granted the patent with solid patent claims.
