Patent ID: 7679497

Claim:
A method for the driver of an automotive vehicle to avoid distraction from the task of driving but yet be able to record all external events, objects, or conditions that may be encountered during the driving of the vehicle, and to record and later recover legal evidence of those conditions, objects, or events using a controller, comprising the steps of: (a) supporting a plurality of optical viewing lenses in fixed positions upon the vehicle around its periphery such that each lens has a fixed field of view in a horizontal plane relative to the vehicle; (b) positioning a central digital recording medium within the automotive vehicle in a secure location; (c) continuously energizing both the digital recording medium and all of the viewing lenses while the vehicle is moving so as to acquire optical information of images captured by the lenses, convert the optical information into electrical form in actual time, and record the electrical information in a time division process in actual time on separate tracks in the central recording medium; (d) when the vehicle is stopped, retrieving the thus-recorded electrical information from the separate tracks of the recording medium and reconstituting for each individual viewing lens the images that were captured in its corresponding fixed field of view; and (e) wherein at least one vehicle corner has a pair of viewing lenses mounted with their major viewing axes in generally perpendicular relation to each other so as to provide overlapping fields of view to cooperatively view at least about a quarter circle of the perimeter outside the vehicle in a horizontal plane relative to the vehicle.