Don’t bother wearing a giant and unwieldy sun hat: just use a regular baseball cap with this one amazing enhancement!

The Issue:

As anyone who has worn a baseball cap knows, the brim does a passable job of shading the wearer’s eyes, but it provides inadequate coverage to the sides of the face and back of the neck, both of which are prime sunburn spots.

Proposal:

One certainly could just wear a full-360º-coverage hat (e.g., a cowboy hat), but that seems like overkill. What we really want is the ability to redeploy the brim to wherever it is needed most (specifically, in the direction of the sun).

A person could always manually rotate the cap around their head as their orientation with respect to the sun changes, but this would be quite labor intensive. The solution is simple: just elevate the brim slightly and place it on a motorized sun-tracking swiveling base (Figure 1).

Fig. 1: Left: some chump without a hat is getting bombarded by photons from the nearby star (top, shown in yellow). Right: this motorized sun-tracking hat rotates the brim (in this case, a fashionable leaf) to provide maximum sun-blocking ability.

Conclusion:

Since the brim is lightweight and can be easily mounted on low-friction bearings, it should take almost no energy to rotate it to block the sun. In fact, the whole thing could quite likely even be solar powered!

PROS: Reduces instances of sunburn without requiring a bulky hat to be lugged around.

CONS: It’s theoretically possible that a glitch in the control system could cause the brim to spin around rapidly. If cartoons are any indication, this would likely cause the user to fly up to a great height, possibly causing acrophobia.

Originally published 2026-08-31.