Driving Into The Light

Opel, the German car company, is working on a new feature where a car's headlights will point wherever the driver is looking.  That is, a small camera in the interior tracks the driver's eyes, and then turns the headlights to point in the same direction, lighting whatever the driver is looking at.  Is it just me, or is that an awful lot of work for little benefit?

I am, of course, trying not to be one of those people who thinks that everything in the world was just perfect at the time of his birth, and anything new is unnecessary.  "If headlights that pointed forward were good enough for my parents and grandparents, then they're good enough for anyone."  But still, I think there's a threshold before innovations become worth it.

I first started thinking about it when appliance makers started promoting the idea of the Internet-connected refrigerator. That's a concept that is still waiting to take off, even though it was proposed years ago, so I think we can safely say that it was an idea we weren't ready for.

I figured that you can understand it better if you look at another technology attached to fridges: the light inside. I don't know when they first started putting lights inside fridges, but you can bet that when they did, someone questioned its necessity.  And you can understand why: there was (I'm assuming) a time when a lightbulb in a refrigerator would have been prohibitively expensive, however convenient it is. But today, such a feature probably adds an insignificant amount to the price of the appliance, so why not?

At the time they first added Internet connectivity to fridges, it was still a pretty expensive compared to the price of the rest of the fridge.  Today, you could slap the electronic guts of a tablet on a refrigerator door without adding a lot to the price, so maybe it's ready to become an optional feature, but it's still not at the point of being as ubiquitous as the light.

But eye-following headlights?  If we get to the point where cars are so full of electronics that there's a camera on the driver's face anyway, and lots of computing power to recognize the driver's gaze anyway, then you're at fridge light level, and you might as well aim the lights where the driver is looking.  But for now, it's just something they can put on luxury cars so that people will feel like their high price tag is money well-spent.