It’s an interesting discovery from neuroscience that humans actually quite rarely use any of their senses in isolation. For instance, taste and smell get combined all the time. A great deal of what we think we taste actually comes from smell, while sometimes what we think is smell is actually a taste – sweet is a flavour, not an odour. Similarly, we’re very bad at identifying smells when they’re provided to us without any context, like in a colourless solution. This is because all of our senses work together to create a detailed picture of the universe, and when our access to the multitude of our senses is taken away from us, it’s much harder to make sense of our world.
So it’s no surprise that when we’re in a vehicle, it’s actually quite difficult to be aware of our surroundings, as opposed to in our natural environment. We’re normally just judging on vision. To make matters worse, other vehicles may be travelling so fast that our senses can’t fully process them and we have to use tricks of cognitive prediction. And on top of all that, we have quite a limited field of vision.
The rear vision camera helps alleviate this difficulty somewhat. By showing a real-time depiction of the space behind your vehicle, the reversing camera kit ensures that you’re much better informed about your surroundings when you’re reversing, and the technology helps compensate for all of the impairments mentioned already. Since reversing – especially parallel parking – can be one of the trickiest things to do while driving, and contains ample opportunity to accidentally damage your own or someone else’s vehicle, it’s important to get this right. A reversing camera will expand your sense of sight to fill in for all the other senses that you don’t have.
