Remember the coolest movie screen tech of all time? It was definitely the virtual data screens that Tony Stark used in Iron Man. Well, they’re not quite here yet – but they are coming closer to reality.
A big step forward toward hovering screen systems like that has been taken by scientists at South Korea’s LG Corporation. The latest advances in their floating screen tech have suddenly been revealed by being nominated for a major industry award for emerging technology.
LG
The LG prototype Ultraview Windshield Display is state-of-the-art display technology that automatically projects data like navigation, speed and media at different virtual distances from the driver depending on how important the information is.
The system is a finalist in this year’s in-industry Automotive News PACE Pilot awards for emerging auto technology. I’m afraid that at present we have to report that it is being built just for cars – not free-floating mid-air superhero lab holograms.
Ultraview combines a head-up display (HUD) for road data with a virtual screen for media and climate controls. It is made for use in a confined space like a car cockpit. When you turn the vehicle off, the display vanishes completely. There is no visible black masking or tinting left behind on the glass, giving automakers freedom to build minimalist, uncluttered cabins.
[LG on board 2] Tech Showcase: UltraView Windshield Display
Just to stress the limits of contemporary physics, at present, you cannot grab or swipe through these screens with your bare hands like Iron Man could.
Nevertheless, rather than using a physical screen on the dashboard, the LG Ultraview system utilizes a hybrid optical unit inside the dashboard to bounce light off the windshield. This Augmented Reality layer projects critical driving data (like arrows over real-world roads) so it looks like it is floating far out on the road in front of the car.
A hover screen forms a secondary layer that projects your music, climate controls and settings so they appear to float as a flat, virtual 20-inch screen exactly 1.2 m (around 4 ft) in front of your eyes.
And we have discovered that the goal of all this isn’t to build a new suit for our favorite Marvel superhero, it is to increase road safety. By tricking your eyes into focusing slightly ahead, the idea is that you can read your dashboard messages without shifting your gaze away from traffic.
Automakers have spent years filling car interiors with increasingly monstrous touchscreens. This has created problems that LG is attempting to solve. Road safety experts are increasingly concerned about tech that forces drivers to look away from the road to tap physical screens. Because Ultraview stacks information at natural optical focal points, it dramatically reduces unnecessary eye movements and cognitive load.
Toyota
LG’s breakthrough appears to be merging a full digital cockpit and an AR projector that would usually require massive layout space. Standard wide-field-of-view AR-HUDs have historically been engineering nightmares. Their interior mirrors require a massive dashboard cage which makes them nearly impossible to fit inside cars. LG has managed to fit the entire dual optical structure into a 15-liter space, making it easily compatible with dashboard space.
Projecting an image onto an ordinary curved windshield causes light to bounce off both the inside and outside of the glass, creating a blurry ghost image. To solve this, current vehicles require heavily modified, model-specific windshields with expensive integrated angled areas or they use permanent black masking tints on the glass.
The Ultraview optical array eliminates those problems. It uses a focus-free projection system with digital distortion-correction algorithms. This handles the glass curvature mathematically, meaning the windshield looks completely clean and ordinary when the system is powered down.
Current premium cars either force you to look at a cluster 0.5 m (1.6 ft) away, or use basic HUDs that lock text at one fixed distance. Constantly shifting your eyes between different focal depths can cause significant eye fatigue. The LG system is considered “context-aware” because it intelligently merges advanced driver assistance alerts with the driving environment, projecting data onto the windshield at different depths based on how critically it relates to the road ahead.
LG
As a PACE Pilot finalist, Ultraview is currently a non-commercialized prototype undergoing advanced testing with un-named global automakers. While you cannot buy a car with this display today, insiders project that annual automotive HUD shipments will more than double – to over 25 million units by 2032 – meaning windshield architectures like Ultraview are likely to enter production very soon.
Source: LG
