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Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

really! This definitely makes me note to be sure to strongly consider mazda next time i'm in the market. I don't want any of that stuff.

All US cars now come with a screen, because backup cameras are now legally required. So I guess most of them say if there has to be a screen anyway, of course it should be a touch screen with controls, or it's just sitting there useless when you're not using the backup camera.

I don't want a backup camera or a screen at all, but if I have to have one, at least don't make it a touch screen, please.

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It's a real shame that "computerizing everything" meant taking all the shit we hate from computers, like long bootups, complex failure conditions, constant restarting, and complicated inferfaces and putting that into everything while making nothing better.

I'd recommend giving Mazda's infotainment a chance. It's not pretty, but it gets out of your way enough that you get to enjoy the car. That was kinda the point of getting a miata in the first place.

I once had a GMC (that was in most other ways terrible), that embedded the backup camera screen behind the rear view mirror glass. There was a direct connection between it and the backup camera. The backup camera was triggered by the backup lights, so no head console integration was required.

That was nice. Hopefully, some manufacturer will cater to the touchscreen backlash crowd,and it'll become popular.

like it replaced the rear view mirror, you didn't have a windshield-mounted mirror anymore when backup camera was engaged?

I guess that makes sense -- I'm kind of surprised it's legal!

although I guess the windshield-mount rearview mirror isn't actually legally required anyway, for instance in trucks/vans/other situations with obstructed sightlines to back of car.

Anyway, what you describe sounds really cool and subtle in a good way, like the kind of thing we imagined we'd get in the future, when we imagined the future would be designed well, instead of the hacky poorly designed terrible UX future we've got.

my similar system in a Toyota only replaces the left-most ~1/4 of the rear-view mirror, so it's still pretty usable as a rear-view mirror when it's active.

I had a rental three row SUV (was supposed to be a compact, but when the first two assigned cars weren't in their spots, they gave me something that was there) with a video augmented windshield mounted mirror. It would run during forward operation too, and it was kind of nice --- couldn't see much with that long of a vehicle and tinted rear window, but it was hard to use, because going from long focus looking forward to short focus looking at a screen a foot away, and going back to long focus forward was weird. Also, it was distracting because you could kind of see the actual mirror image if you looked at the mirror while your eyes were long focused.

> because going from long focus looking forward to short focus looking at a screen a foot away, and going back to long focus forward was weird

You don't normally find this a problem with windshield-mounted mirrors? I wonder what the difference is, and if you'd get used to it if driving regularly.

Could likely get used to it, but not in a few days. Once I turned it off, I felt a lot better.

I don't notice a focus change going from looking out the windshield to looking through the mirror. There almost certainly is one, but it's not as drastic, because you don't focus on the surface of the mirror... and, as you note, it's what I'm used to.

It makes sense. I wonder if a higher-res screen would also not have you focusing on the surface; shouldn't a high enough res screen be to your eyes just like a mirror? I'm just curious now why it's different!

I think you'd need a lens arrangement to make the image appear inside the mirror. It's not just related to binocular vision either, if you have focus a camera on an object appearing in a (flat) mirror, the focal distance is going to be pretty close to the distance from the camera to the mirror + the distance from the mirror to the object.

Now, I don't think you need to get this exactly right, but if you could make the video image appear at a focal depth close to to the length from the mirror to the back window, it would be a lot easier on the eyes than the image appearing at a focal depth of about a foot. I'm not good with optics though, so don't ask me how to do that! :D

I had a rental with a video rear view mirror (you could turn it off it and became a regular rear view mirror) and I actually liked it - the car had a small rear window so you got a wider field of view from the video, and it was clearer at night with less glare.

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