Hacker News Reader

Comment by stephengillie | Hacker News Reader

In the United States, regulations dictate that cars coming off of the assembly line must have a flat mirror on the driver's side. Curved mirrors are allowed for cars' passenger-side mirrors only if they include the phrase "Objects in mirror are closer than they appear."

Because of these regulations, Hicks's mirrors will not be installed on new cars sold in the U.S. any time soon. The mirror may be manufactured and sold as an aftermarket product that drivers and mechanics can install on cars after purchase. Some countries in Europe and Asia do allow slightly curved mirrors on new cars. Hicks has received interest from investors and manufacturers who may pursue opportunities to license and produce the mirror.

View on HN

Last I knew cars in the US don't even have to have a passenger side mirror. I remember seeing the old base model Dodge Neon's on the streets with just a driver side window and confirmed they were sold as such, presumably to reduce costs.

Passenger side mirrors are far and away the norm in the US.

I have never seen a car without a passenger side mirror.

I am an easy sell to jump to conclusions about gov't idiocy but this one is so audacious it seems like there must a relevant reason - so why can't I have a curved mirror that is more efficient?

Curved mirrors are more efficient in one sense but tends to lead people to misjudge distances. Presumably the government think that showing a misleading picture may be worse than not showing one at all, which is not complete idiocy. This mirror apparently doesn't really suffer from that problem, but the legislation didn't anticipate it - which isn't really surprising, it's hardly realistic to expect them to foresee this development.

Indeed the picture in the article immediately made me think "How do I know how far those cars are away?" The objects in that mirror seem a lot closer than they appear, which strikes me as a different danger.

Any mirror tends to lead people to misjudge distances and speeds. Mirrors are not things we naturally understand and you have to get used to judging how far behind you something is, while looking in front of you. If you're looking in a mirror and something comes in your direction very fast, you tend to step back... directly into the thing coming at you.

Curved mirrors also take getting used to, but I doubt it has ever been shown that the number of errors people make because of using curved mirrors is larger than the number of errors people make while using regular mirrors.

These kinds of rules get introduced because someone thinks "this makes sense", other people reading it think "this makes sense" and nobody with enough actual knowledge about the subject, who cares enough and has enough lobbying power, goes "now wait a second, this is not right".

You seem to be doing exactly what you're condemning them for. Just because your opinion differs from theirs is no reason to assume they are incorrect or that there are no studies involved.

I was explaining that the common argument (curved mirrors cause mistakes) doesn't make any sense (because other mirrors also cause mistakes) and how that argument could lead to a law anyway (because people are very used to regular mirrors and the mistakes they cause). You're reading a judgment into that, but I don't think I wrote one.

I don't condemn anyone for taking decisions based on what seems to make sense, when the stakes aren't very high and in the absence of anyone telling them otherwise. We can't expect decisionmakers to be experts in everything and we can't expect them to hire experts for every little detail. As long as things get changed when the facts are presented, I'm not complaining.

> but I doubt it has ever been shown that the number of errors people make because of using curved mirrors is larger than the number of errors people make while using regular mirrors.

I'm even more interested in the number of errors people make from curved mirrors compared to the number of errors people make from having no mirrors at all (regarding the blind spot area)

Reserve your judgment on government idiocy until we see how long it takes the government to update its legislation in response to this new invention.

It's not necessarily that a curved mirror is always worse, there's value in consistency so that drivers don't have to adjust to different cars. If there isn't a lot of value in picking the "right" answer, it may be beneficial for government to mandate one standard "good enough" solution.

I wouldn't be surprised if the original intention was to keep carmakers from putting shitty warped mirrors on the car.

Whatever, at least regulations have mellowed out a bit from the days when you were supposed to have someone walking a ways ahead of you to warn people a car was approaching.

so the question becomes, is his patent valid in Europe and Asia?

Pretty much all cars where I live (Finland) already have non-flat mirrors.

The most common type of mirror on the driver's side in new cars seems to be one which has a flat part (to show objects in their "true size") and a curved part at (to show a wider field of view).

yeah my old polo from the 90s has a drivers mirror that has a flat part and then a second, differently angled section that lets you see the blind spot.

In India, we have stick-on blind spot mirrors that you can attach on your driver side mirror.

No, because there is prior art. I'm not even sure it would stand in the US.

It's been a while since I have not driven a car that has a flat mirror near side (cost cuts and relative driver position makes far side less of a problem. Still, they're often not exactly flat either).

Cars here (Europe) generally have an improved version, as the linear radius was giving too much of a fisheye, which breaks depth linearity. The improved version starts with a quasi-flat mirror for the 2/3rd near the car, while the remainder has an increasing radius (Here's a shot [0]). The result is (when properly seated and mirrors set up) basically enough for the passing car to pop up at the edge of my field of vision when it disappears from the mirror.

[0] http://www.cleanmpg.com/photos/data/523/2007_Civic_iCDTi_Hat...

He would be able to patent all curved mirrors, just his particular implementation and design. He may have an optimal design that certainly would deserve patent protection.

The question that he has to worry about with the patents is whether or not his 2008 paper was published before or after the non-US patents were applied for. If I'm not mistaken, the US has a one year grace period between public display (publishing an academic paper) and filing for a patent. Whereas Europe et al. do not have a grace period.

If you lookup the patent on the USPTO's system:

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sec...

You will find that the ultimate filing date is Feb. 2007, and that multiple publications by Dr. Hicks were cited in the "Other References" area.

According to its PCT entry [1], it's still making its way through the Australian, Canadian, European, and Japanese patent offices.

1: http://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO200...

US patents are only valid in the US. He has to obtain a patent in each country separately (other than in the European union where it is possible to get a "European Patent").

What if you have both?

yeah. The ideal approach is a flat mirror with a curved one inset either above or below. That way you beg both.

However it seems to me that there is a bit of basic math at work here. The more you fit into a mirror of the same size, the smaller the objects will appear and the further away they will look. That strikes me as a very basic premise and I don't think you can get away from that so easily.

I was thinking of having stacked mirrors, the way tractor trucks do. But your comment made me think: is there a way to have a flat mirror turn transparent, revealing a curved mirror behind it? You could activate the transparency just by using your turn signal.

Yeah, stacked is good.

Bigger vehicles such as buses often have a large flat mirror and a small half-globe shaped mirror attached to them. This provides proper distance and gives a nice wide view when you need it.

I would prefer cameras, but I am not sure if they are still not legal in the US.

Maybe since it is based on tiny flat mirrors (like a disco ball), that law can somehow be loopholed. If the law was based on wanting to avoid distortions, whether the law applies to these new mirrors should be reconsidered? Surely, _some_ common sense exists in US legislature?

It's not actually flat:

Hicks noted that, in reality, the mirror does not look like a disco ball up close. There are tens of thousands of such calculations to produce a mirror that has a smooth, nonuniform curve.

I imagine "tens of thousands of such calculations" is newspaper code for integration.

If someone assigned me the task of making such a mirror, I would start by treating the mirror like a monitor displaying a 3D scene, and calculate the vectors necessary to project a 45 degree view onto the surface of the mirror (i.e. start with a virtual camera behind the mirror such that it has a 45 degree field of view). I would then adjust those vectors so that the image will look like such a projection when seen by a viewer a few feet up and to the right, with the mirror occupying ~15 degrees of the viewer's FOV.

In other words, everything I need to know I learned from video games.

If I were asked to make such a device, I would build a flexible mirror whose curve could be adjusted by an array of attached screws. I'd fix said mirror to a car, and adjust the screws until the desired curve was reached. I'd then measure the curve and duplicate it in a rigid finished product.

It's actually amazing that it took a physicist/mathematician to think of this thing. I doubt I would have come up with the idea. It goes to show how domain knowledge shapes your perception of the world.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com