Teen wins NZ$39,000 for eliminating blind spots
An American teenager has come up with an ingenious way to eliminate blind spots and won herself US$25,000 (NZ$39,260) in the process.
Alaina Gassler’s mother often grew frustrated with blind spots when driving the family’s Jeep Grand Cherokee and it inspired the 14-year-old to design a system that uses a webcam to show anything blocked from a driver’s sight.
A panel of scientists, engineers and educators was so impressed with her prototype that it won her the top prize at the annual Broadcom MASTERS competition in Washington this month, The New York Times reports.
Gassler beat 29 other middle school students in the science and engineering competition, which drew 2,348 applicants nationwide. She says she wanted to improve road safety by removing blind spots created by vehicles’ A-pillars, which support the car’s frame and hold windshields in place.
“There are so many car accidents and injuries and deaths that could have been prevented from a pillar not being there, and since we can’t take it out of cars, I decided to get rid of it without getting rid of it,” she says in her award video.
Her materials were a projector, a webcam and reflective fabric. The webcam was fixed on the outside of a car’s A-pillar and a projector was mounted underneath the vehicle’s roof “to project the image onto the pillar or the blind spot”. To help make the image clearer, she applied reflective fabric on the pillar so that it can be seen only by the driver.
Gassler says the system worked during test drives and the family has posted a video of the design on YouTube, where it has had more than 3.2 million views.
