Alaina Gassler’s mom didn’t like driving the family’s Jeep Grand Cherokee. The problem was the thick pillars on either side of the windshield, which hid a surprising amount of the road, especially when turning. Her grandmother had already scraped the side of her own car because of the same kind of blind spot.

So in 2019, as an eighth grader in West Grove, Pennsylvania, Alaina decided to make the pillar disappear. Her project beat 29 other finalists to take the top prize at the Broadcom MASTERS, a national science and engineering competition for middle schoolers, and earned her the $25,000 Samueli Foundation Prize.

The parts list was surprisingly short

The system came down to four things: a webcam, a small projector, a 3D-printed part and a special kind of fabric. She focused on the passenger-side pillar, because on the family’s Jeep it was especially wide.

The webcam went on the outside of that pillar, pointing at the view it blocked. The live feed ran to a projector mounted near the sunroof, just above the driver’s head, which beamed the picture onto the inside of the pillar. Projectors aren’t built to focus that close, so she 3D-printed an adapter to sharpen the image at short range.

When it lines up correctly, the driver sees the road continue straight through the pillar, as if the pillar were made of glass.

The clever part is the fabric

Her first attempts had a problem. Projecting onto the bare pillar trim gave a blurry, washed-out picture, and the light spilled around the cabin where it could distract or annoy everyone else.

The fix was retroreflective fabric. It’s a material designed to bounce light straight back toward wherever it came from, instead of scattering it in all directions. It’s the same principle that makes road signs and safety vests glow in your headlights while looking dull from the side.

Because the projector sat right next to the driver’s head, almost all the reflected light went back toward the driver’s eyes. As Alaina told Mashable, the passengers only see a black piece of fabric. The driver gets a clear picture, and everyone else just sees a dark pillar.

Why car pillars got so thick in the first place

Plenty of drivers have noticed that newer cars seem harder to see out of, and they’re not imagining it. Those front pillars, called A-pillars, hold up the front of the roof. In a rollover crash, they’re a big part of what stops the roof from caving in on the people inside.

In 2009, the US government doubled the force a car roof must withstand in testing, from 1.5 to 3 times the vehicle’s own weight. NHTSA estimated the stronger roofs would prevent around 135 deaths a year. But the rule had a side effect. Stronger roofs generally need sturdier pillars, and at the steep angle of a windshield, sturdier usually means wider.

Add airbags and padding inside the pillar trim, and you end up with a post wide enough to hide a pedestrian or even a car at an intersection. Some automakers have worked hard to slim pillars down again without losing strength, but it’s a constant trade-off between surviving a rollover and seeing the cyclist before you turn.

How it compares to what’s in cars now

Most new cars tackle blind spots with sensors rather than cameras. Blind-spot monitoring systems use radar to detect vehicles beside or behind you, then flash a light in the side mirror or beep a warning. They’re genuinely useful, but they mostly cover the side and rear of the car, not the front corners the A-pillar hides.

There’s also a difference in what they ask of the driver. A warning light tells you something might be there, and you still have to check. Alaina’s approach tries to let you simply see it, which is closer to how drivers naturally take in the road.

That doesn’t mean the prototype was ready for a showroom. It was a homemade setup on one car, and a projector bouncing around on a sunroof isn’t ideal. She talked about using curved screens wrapped around the pillar in a future version, and she and her dad said they hoped to pursue patents on the idea.

Small fix, big problem

What made the project stand out to the judges wasn’t expensive hardware. It was that she noticed an everyday annoyance her own family lived with, worked out why it happened, and fixed it with parts most hobbyists could buy or print.

It’s also a reminder of how many tech problems are really about the gap between what a car needs to be (strong enough to survive a crash) and what a driver needs to do (see clearly). Engineers at car companies have been working on that gap for years. A 14-year-old with a webcam and a roll of reflective fabric took a pretty good swing at it too.