If you’re a motorist, you’ve encountered a blind spot issue at some point. It’s one of those situations when a pillar is obscuring your vision of items at the corners of your car. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that blind spots cause over 840,000 automobile accidents each year. Fortunately for us, someone has come up with a solution – and she isn’t even old enough to drive!
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Alaina Gassler, 14, of West Grove, Pennsylvania, may not yet have her driver’s license, but that didn’t stop her from inventing a revolutionary new technique to overcome the issue of blind spots in automobiles.
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People were blown away by the girl’s clever innovation when she presented it at the Broadcom MASTERS (Math, Applied Science, Technology, and Engineering for Rising Stars) competition last week.
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Alaina’s proposal is titled “Improving Automobile Safety by Removing Blind Spots,” and the mechanism behind her creation is relatively straightforward.
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She used a camera and a video projector to tackle the blind spot issue.
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“I achieved it by placing a camera behind a car’s a-pillar, which transferred the footage to a projector, which projected the picture onto the pillar, thereby rendering it invisible and allowing the driver to see beyond it,” Alaina stated.
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Alaina received the Samueli Foundation Prize for overall STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) achievement, worth 25,000 dollars.
