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To test the night vision technology in the Mercedes E-Class, Guy Bird took on the hairpins of the Stelvio Pass in the Italian Alps, in the dark. With no lights. He also made a short film of his unusual road trip...

Night vision technology has come a long way since the first heat-sensing systems used in WWII by the US Army to spot enemy targets writes Guy Bird. Today, the latest systems are now so effective and affordable they're being offered as road safety devices on civilian cars.

Car manufacturer research found that many accidents were occurring on poorly-lit country roads due to cars only using dipped beams to avoid blinding on-coming traffic. They then worked out that night vision systems in tandem with dipped beams greatly enhance drivers' ability to see further down the road and spot hazards earlier.

To see how good night vision technology has become three plucky British journalists drove up the infamous 60-hairpin Stelvio Pass in the Italian Alps in a night vision-equipped Mercedes E-Class at midnight, and then taped up the exterior lights to see if the night vision system alone might be enough to navigate by.

The car uses ‘near infrared' technology (also known as ‘active infrared') to allow the driver to ‘see' just beyond the visible light spectrum of the human eye. It works by illuminating the road with invisible, and therefore non-reflective, infrared light from the car's two inner front headlamps. A tiny infrared light-sensitive camera mounted in the windscreen then records what it sees and beams the greyscale images to a small LCD display on the dashboard.

The system in the new E-Class not only detects pedestrians, cyclists or obstacles up to 90 metres ahead, but also highlights them via a graphic on-screen framing device to help avoid them. Luckily, halfway up the Stelvio Pass at midnight pedestrians and cyclists are thin on the ground – but the technology's still useful for displaying the odd car, plus obstacles like stone walls and boulders, behind which lie huge drops down the mountainside.

Mercedes' system is not the first to be plumbed into a passenger car but most of the others major on ‘far' or ‘passive' infrared technology that processes infrared radiation and displays the images on the car's front windscreen.

While they can work up to greater distances than ‘near infrared' the images tend to be much grainier and lower resolution, and Mercedes says such heat-reliant systems don't always work as well if the object to be detected is of a similar temperature to the atmosphere around it, ie rocks or boulders warmed up by hot weather may fail to be picked up by the sensor.

To test the theory that our night vision really could substitute for headlights, the car's main and side headlamps were taped over, leaving only the tiny but crucial infrared light elements exposed. Even so, you'd be hard pressed to read a book by the light left remaining outside, let alone drive anywhere. A safety car drove several hairpins in front (to alert any cars coming the other way) and then it was the turn of our night vision car to set off.

Mercedes' system only kicks in at about 14mph, so once the night vision system has been activated by a small button in the dash it takes a real leap of faith to accelerate into the darkness and just wait for the satnav screen to start beaming back images. But put your foot down properly and the critical speed is quickly reached – a second later the camera is feeding back crystal clear, virtually real-time images to the driver's cabin.

It's a particularly unnerving experience driving a car up a narrow, unlit mountain pass navigating almost completely on the basis of images that resemble a black and white videogame on a screen normally reserved for consulting the satnav.ght vision But after some mental and physical adjustment, traversing the straighter sections gets easier and we go above 25mph.

The hairpins are trickier. The night vision images that feed back as each corner is taken are no more than a fast-moving blur of impending wall. The only way to tackle them is to pick a line hugging the outside wall before you enter the corner and make the turn into the middle of the darkness as smoothly as possible. Without being able to see inside the curve, memories of turns taken in daylight practice runs help, but as soon as the road straightens up again the night vision tech shows the path forward remarkably clearly. After ten minutes more concentration, and dozens more hairpins, the summit is reached.

Of course, ours was a slightly daft test that should ‘not to be tried at home' – or halfway up a mountain – but it nonetheless shows how sharp an image ‘near infrared' night vision can project and how effective a tool it could be for road safety. It's also quite affordable at £1,100 and could well filter down to cheaper and smaller models in time, just like so many other devices from airbags to ABS.

Guy Bird is a freelance journalist, specialising in cars and car design. This article appears in the CR February issue.

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Via Creative Review

Personal comment:

Just interested by the strange, unlikely (and a bit nerdly stupid) experience.

David McCandles is a London-based author, writer and designer who’s website is called Information Is Beautiful. I’ve never heard of an ‘independent visual and data journalist, but I have now, and think I like them. Tons of great information graphics and a weighty client-base to boot.

“My pet-hate is pie charts. Love pie. Hate pie-charts.”

www.informationisbeautiful.net

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Via It's Nice That

Personal comment:

Just a resource and a blog about well designed information design... project.

The Ecological and Economical Traffic Light Concept [relogik.com] by Damjan Stankovic is a Red Dot Design 2009 Award winner and consists of a simple yet, potentially highly practical visualization concept for everyday traffic lights that could reduce pollution and promote safer driving. There might already be quite some traffic light time counters around today, but few focus on informing the car drivers in a physically integrative and visually glanceable way like this proposed design concept.

Eko Light is specifically designed so it can be easily installed onto existing traffic light systems without much effort. It claims to bring forward following benefits:
- Less pollution, as drivers can turn their engines off and cut carbon emissions while waiting for the green light,
- Less fuel consumption, as turning off vehicle engines lowers fuel consumption in the long run,
- Less stress, since drivers know exactly how long to wait, and
- Safer driving, as all traffic participants are fully aware of how much time they have left before the light changes, reducing the chance for potential traffic accidents.

Via Gizmodo and @krees.

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Via Information esthetics

Spam Visualization [spamvisualization.net] contains a small collection of beautifully stylized data visualizations based on the data retrieved from the Spam Catalog Database.

The available data visualization techniques include a Bubble Size Quantity Grid (sorted by date, size or IP number), a Word Frequency Graph (sorted by count, alphabet or length), a Top Level Pie Chart (the circles show the ratio of the toplevel domain endings in emails and link URLs), some IP Number Glyphs, and a Time Frequency Bar Graph (shows the spam income of the last seven days, with color depending on the amount per hour.).

More visuals are available at Flickr. Thnkx Kim.

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Via Information aesthetics

 

Schmidt & Pohflepp: Social Collider / William Forsythe & ACCAD: Synchronous Objects

A disclaimer is in order: The following post is not original content, rather it is a collection of links provided by various people on a private mailing list. The initial request (from Memo Akten) was for “really hot data visualization”, and the following suggestions were made by some fairly knowledgeable people.

They are presented here as an unedited list of links, they are listed in the order they appeared on the list. Some are fairly new projects while others are well-known canonical works. Two new favorites are shown above, namely Social Collider and Synchronous Objects.

Some pseudo-random Info Viz links

• Tom Carden: “As always VisualComplexity and Infosthetics are good places to start.” Tom’s Delicious bookmarks on the subject is a treasure trove in its own right.
• A good survey article by Mitchell Whitelaw: Art Against Information: Case Studies in Data Practice
• Data Flow is an excellent book from Die Gestalten presenting an unconventional eye to visualization practices.
• Karsten Schmidt recommends:
  • The ever-present Ben Fry: benfry.com/projects (Ben’s blog is an excellent read, by the way)
  • Martin Wattenberg et al.: History Flow
  • Marius Watz: Knight Capital Group
  • Tom Carden’s work, see Stamen and www.tom-carden.co.uk.
  • Karsten Schmidt & Sascha Pohflepp: Socialcollider (a Twitter visualization made as an experiment for Google Chrome)
  • Karsten Schmidt: Base-26
• William Forsythe and ACCAD (lead generative designer Matthew Lewis): Synchronous Objects
• Emily Gobeille & Theodore Watson: Zanyparade (programmed elements combined with hand-drawn forms)
• Syl Eckermann & Gerald Nestler: Plastic Trade-Off
• Edward Tufte: Ask E.T. forum

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Via Generator.X

Personal comment:

Marius Watz, auteur du blog Generator.X (generative design) donne ici quelques liens et ressources vers des designers attachés aux questions de visualisation d'informations.

Composer JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, director of the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology (CREATE) at UC Santa Barbara, demos the AlloSphere [ucsb.edu] at a TED talk, and show an entirely new way to see and interpret scientific data, in full color and surround sound inside a 3-story high, massive metal sphere.

Some of the claims seem a bit far-fetched, but the presentation is amazing and compelling nonetheless. The presentation lets you dive into the brain, feel electron spin, hear the music of the elements. Works shown include an interactive visualization of unique atomic bonds, an immersive art installation bringing forth a complex ecosystem of creativity and a multimodal representation of quantum mechanics.

Watch the video HERE.

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Via Information aethetics

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Personal comment:

L'architecte Marcos Novak, rencontré lors de Postopolis!LA, m'a parlé de cette sphère de visualisation (et proposé d'y réaliser un travail). Il est lui-même enseignant en architecture à UCSB et a utilisé l'Allosphere à différente reprise.

Pastiche [christianmarcschmidt.com] is a (downloadable) dynamic data visualization that maps keywords from blog articles to the New York neighborhoods they are written in reference to, geographically positioned in a navigable, spatial view. Keywords are assigned based on relevance and recency, surrounding their corresponding neighborhoods. The result is a dynamically changing description of the city, formed around individual experiences and perspectives.

Reminds me of the "typographic city" music video "The Child".

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Via Information Aesthetics

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Personal comment:

Le champ grandissant de la visualisation de données dynamique, qui consite souvent en des processus de "mapping" ou de "mashup" de données hétérogènes. Ici un travail entre la cartographie, l'architecture, l'écriture, les blogs et l'analyse de données. Le tout pouvant révéler des couches "cachées" de récits sur la ville et ses quartiers.

The "jury", who were Nicholas O'Leary and infosthetics, have chosen the winner of the paper-based visualization competition. First of all, a great thank you for all those who have submitted their entries! It is amazing to see the amount of creativity, time and effort has been put into each single submission.

Petals [charlenelam.com] by Charlene Lam merged the qualities of beauty, originality, and usability the best. As an independent object, it looks clean and sophisticated. The curves give it a real organic feel whilst the relation between daylight hours is clear. It is also definitely something that can be picked up and examined for a closer look. The price, the book Tactile: High Touch Visuals will be on its way soon.

Check out all the other entries below. Let us know what you think about the entries, and having competitions on infosthetics in general.

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Via Information Aesthetics