Lucas Van Dyke

At night, drivers have difficulty seeing bikers. Bikes usually have little reflectivity, and at best small flashing lights. With such little visual information given by a blinking light in the dark, new drivers don't know what is in the road, how far away it is, which direction it is moving, or at what speed. It is not until the headlight beams hit the object that drivers know what they are approaching and at that point the driver might not have time to react. A blinking light on the side of the road could be a biker, traffic barrel, road sign, or a person walking on the side of the road. Each of those objects should be approached differently because they will all have different possible speeds of travel and could be in a very different location by the time they are approached.

To figure out the best way to create better visibility for a rider, I looked at both Sailboats and Billboards. When a boat is approaching a sailboat, the sailboat will shine their lights up at their own sail rather than the oncoming boat. This advertises that they are a sailboat, or increases object identification, and communicates to the oncoming boat their spacial relation, speed and direction of travel, and size. At night billboards can be seen across a mountain side or from incredible distances with no need for car lights to shine on them, This is because billboards have their own lights shining on them. --- Back-lighting helps with: object and size identification, depth perception, speed and direction understanding, and visibility from all angles can be achieved.

The bike light Attaches to the bike seatstay with a simple clip. To grab drivers attention I kept the blinking red lights facing the oncoming traffic, but added a directional spot light for illuminating the bike rider. The directional white spotlight shines onto the bikers legs and back, which will use the leg movement to again increase the object identification and visible attention of motion on the object. There is also a simple water resistant on / off switch. I thought about designing the device to use electricity created by the motion of the bike, but with batteries so inexpensive, I wanted to have the increased reliability of batteries.

Blinking red lights grab drivers attention while back-lighting communicates vital situational information. Better visibility means safer bikers. Bikers can now be seen at any angle without car headlights to shine on them. The light will also not shine into the eyes of the bike rider due to the riders body covering the light before it gets to the riders vision.

Proof of concept. On the left is a biker Without back-lighting, even with a forward facing bike headlight the biker is no more than half a silhouette. With back-lighting the rider pictured to the right is completely visible even without any car lights. Light also won't get in the riders eyes.

Even when the car lights don't reach you, you are still visible to the driver. The Diluna's 8 flashing red LED lights as well as 3 white LED lights are powered for 150 hours by 2 AA batteries. 3D modeled in Autodesk Alias