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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

Time to make a sunglasses and window tint company specifically formulating their products to shield from these kinds of lasers.

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If you find anything, please let me know. The least obtrusive option I've found is this Zeiss lens coating ("Thermo Force") which claims to block 90% of IR "between 780 and 2000 nm", which covers the NIR used in both types of lidar. It only seems to be available as part of sunglasses though.

Laser safety glasses are off-the-shelf, but are usually tuned for a single band stop. There are at least three frequencies of near IR LiDAR in use in the wild.

Hm the ones I can find have a heavy green reflex and their optical density seems about twice or thrice what you'd need for a 1W CW laser. Maybe it's unavoidable given the closeness of near IR and deep red, but I wonder if there exists glasses with a cutoff sharp enough and reduced OD so as to not result in noticeable color shift.

I was thinking more "one could create a business" vibe. The requirements for making everyday protections from errant lasers is different from what you'd need for lab safety working with lasers.

We always used Thorlabs' [0]. If you want to block Waymo (900 - 940 nm), but not Ouster (840 nm), the LG11s may work and are quite transmissive and neutral, but I've never used them. The LG20s are the standard NIR blockers that I'm familiar with.

[0] https://www.thorlabs.com/newgrouppage9.cfm?objectgroup_id=76...

You know, I was just thinking a headset like Oculus would be pretty great for night driving if it was sensitive enough; my night vision is getting really bad and coupled with most new cars having annoyingly bright LED lamps with auto-high beams it's getting super uncomfortable to drive in the dark. Then that would automatically shield eyes from lasers!

One could go further, and have an integrated system where the headset shows video feed from cameras around the car. You could almost get a 3rd person view of your own car like in video games.

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