Art Lebedev might not be a household name in the U.S., but it’s one of the leading design studios in Russia, and it has been known to turn out some pretty interesting ideas. The latest is a system of cameras and screens that lets the traffic behind a semi-truck see what’s on the other side. By putting a camera on the front and a set of projection screens on the rear doors, the traffic behind can see what’s coming–even around bends. That could be a huge help when attempting to pass a semi on a narrow two-lane road, where even following at proper distances it’s hard to see what’s ahead. The design is, for now at least, prohibitively expensive as it requires the car approaching from behind to have a wireless projector capable of displaying the transmission from the truck’s front-mounted camera in order to project the image onto the rear of the truck.
The design negates the need for large, bright screens on the rear of every cargo trailer in existence, but at a cost. Such a projector would have to be incredibly bright to be seen in daylight and also robust to withstand the conditions experienced by the average automobile, but it does show where the future of road safety could be headed. After all, who would have thought ten or twenty years ago that we’d have heads-up tunr-by-turn GPS displays and pedestrian-recognition night-vision cameras in production cars by 2010? Art Lebedev Studio director and designer Artemy Lebedev calls this rolling display concept “Transparentius” and offers it purely as a conceptual take on future road safety.