Vauxhall eye-tracking headlamps point where you look

Vauxhall is planning to revolutionise the humble headlamp, with a range of new technology claiming to make lighting the road ahead safer. The most innovative is a form of 'eye-tracking' that can detect where you look on the road and adjust the beam towards that point.

The system, which Vauxhall's engineering department has been working on for the last two years, has reached the point where it will soon be applied to series production models. It'll become part of the firm's third-generation of adaptive lighting in the next few years.

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Using a cabin-mounted camera with peripheral infra-red sensors, the system can scan the driver's eyes up to 50 times per second to determine their line of sight. It then uses that information to instantly adjust headlamp actuators vertically or horizontally.

Ingolf Schneider, Director of Lighting Technology at Vauxhall/Opel's Technical Development Centre explains the team has developed a "sophisticated delay algorithm" to tackle the issue of jerky eye movement as we naturally move from one focal point to another.

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Vauxhall claims that if the driver is momentarily distracted from looking at the road ahead, lighting is always provided in the direction of travel. 

Alongside this, the firm has announced a more advanced adaptive high-beam system. 'Matrix LED' constantly adjusts individual LEDs in the headlamps so oncoming or preceding traffic is blocked out of the high beam, illuminating the rest of the road. It'll be introduced on UK models in the next 18 months.

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