Thousands of Mazdas in the Seattle area are stuck on a single FM radio station

Re:Thousands of Mazdas in the Seattle area are stuck on a si... by toast0 on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @10:46PM (#30282231)

I had a rental three row SUV (was supposed to be a compact, but when the first two assigned cars weren't in their spots, they gave me something that was there) with a video augmented windshield mounted mirror. It would run during forward operation too, and it was kind of nice --- couldn't see much with that long of a vehicle and tinted rear window, but it was hard to use, because going from long focus looking forward to short focus looking at a screen a foot away, and going back to long focus forward was weird. Also, it was distracting because you could kind of see the actual mirror image if you looked at the mirror while your eyes were long focused.

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Re:Thousands of Mazdas in the Seattle area are stuck on a si... by jrochkind1 on Thursday February 10, 2022 @09:12AM (#30286209)

> because going from long focus looking forward to short focus looking at a screen a foot away, and going back to long focus forward was weird

You don't normally find this a problem with windshield-mounted mirrors? I wonder what the difference is, and if you'd get used to it if driving regularly.

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Re:Thousands of Mazdas in the Seattle area are stuck on a si... by toast0 on Thursday February 10, 2022 @11:46AM (#30288845)

Could likely get used to it, but not in a few days. Once I turned it off, I felt a lot better.

I don't notice a focus change going from looking out the windshield to looking through the mirror. There almost certainly is one, but it's not as drastic, because you don't focus on the surface of the mirror... and, as you note, it's what I'm used to.

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Re:Thousands of Mazdas in the Seattle area are stuck on a si... by jrochkind1 on Thursday February 10, 2022 @03:47PM (#30292265)

It makes sense. I wonder if a higher-res screen would also not have you focusing on the surface; shouldn't a high enough res screen be to your eyes just like a mirror? I'm just curious now why it's different!

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Re:Thousands of Mazdas in the Seattle area are stuck on a si... by toast0 on Thursday February 10, 2022 @05:20PM (#30293516)

I think you'd need a lens arrangement to make the image appear inside the mirror. It's not just related to binocular vision either, if you have focus a camera on an object appearing in a (flat) mirror, the focal distance is going to be pretty close to the distance from the camera to the mirror + the distance from the mirror to the object.

Now, I don't think you need to get this exactly right, but if you could make the video image appear at a focal depth close to to the length from the mirror to the back window, it would be a lot easier on the eyes than the image appearing at a focal depth of about a foot. I'm not good with optics though, so don't ask me how to do that! :D

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