This Engineering Newswire looks at controlling headlights with our eyes, learning how the bench top factory will change our lives, and building kinetic sculptures with the new Rube Goldberg.
Driver’s Eyes Control Headlights
Engineers at Opel/Vauxhall are developing automotive lighting with eye-tracking technology. The firm’s current headlight technology, known as Adaptive Forward Lighting has ten lighting functions that include automated activation of full beam, different lighting patterns for different driving situations, and aiming headlight beams around corners based on a car’s steering.
However, its new eye tracking technology – which has been in production for two years – uses a camera that monitors prominent points on a driver’s face, like your nose and eyes, to detect the driver’s line of sight.
The New Rube Goldberg
Seth Goldstein has been building instruments and machines for over 50 years. And now, some are calling him the new Rube Goldberg.
The MIT engineer spent most of his career working the National Institutes of Health where he served as the Chief of the Mechanical Engineering Section for nearly two decades. Since retiring he hasn’t been golfing or napping all day, but instead is using his skills to create kinetic sculpture machines. His most recent sculpture, is the RO-BOW, a machine that plays a standard full size violin.
How the BenchTop Factory Will Change Our Lives
How can 3D printing shift the industrial design landscape in the future? Armed with this question, FormLabs partnered with the curious minds at London's Royal College of Art to explore the future of desktop manufacturing.
During the semester-long industrial design course, students immersed themselves in additive manufacturing technology and explored the ways our lives may shift as 3D printing gains greater adoption. They call it the Benchtop Factory, and thus far it has yielded some fascinating results.
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