There's a lot of innovation happening in vehicles today, but it's mostly under the hood. The engineers at Bosch decided to look at interior components instead and created an intelligent replacement for the sun visor.

The sun visor has remained pretty much unchanged for decades. It flips down to help keep the sun out of your eyes when required, but it also can't help but reduce your view of the road ahead. Bosch thinks modern technology provides a better solution, and so it created the Virtual Visor, which has already won the Best of Innovation in the CES 2020 Innovation Awards.

Bosch replaced the sun visor with a transparent LCD and then linked it to a facial recognition camera pointing at the driver's face. AI is used to "track the sun's casted shadow on the driver's face" and then an algorithm darkens sections of the Virtual Visor to place the eyes in shadow. The rest of the visor remains transparent, offering the driver a better view of the road.

Jason Zink, technical expert for Bosch in North America and co-creator of the Virtual Visor, explains "We discovered early in the development that users adjust their traditional sun visors to always cast a shadow on their own eyes ... This realization was profound in helping simplify the product concept and fuel the design of the technology."

With thousands of sun glare-related car accidents reported every year, Bosch believes the Virtual Visor can have a positive impact and reduce the accident rate. Whether it gets installed in vehicles will ultimately come down to cost, so expect luxury vehicles to use it first.