BMW’s I Vision Dee Concept Car Changes Colors in Seconds

BMW thinks there is “huge potential” for these kinds of display projection technologies, significantly outside of the compact head-up displays drivers have turn into made use of to around the earlier two decades.

It would be effortless to believe stage 5 of the Dee method is intended for a thoroughly autonomous automobile, in which travellers can swap off from the exterior environment and observe a motion picture or other streamed information. On the other hand, as an indicator of the restraint of BMW’s method with this idea, the i Eyesight Dee features no autonomous driving technology at all.

Adrian van Hooydonk, BMW Group style and design director, suggests: “Augmented actuality is anything that is not just exciting, but essentially useful for driver orientation. You can target on the street forward of you, and the information you need to have will be seemingly projected on to the road. What we’re showing in this Eyesight vehicle is a new technologies that will allow you to use the overall width of the windscreen.”

Shared Eyesight

Eager to establish that this is not vaporware, Van Hooydonk says BMW is very seriously searching into setting up the type of HUD screen demonstrated in the i Vision Dee notion. “We see a lot of gains simply because, once again, your eyes are focusing on the road,” he states, incorporating how the technologies could exchange standard dashboard shows and see instrument clusters totally taken off from at the rear of the steering wheel.

BMW says a manufacturing model of its new HUD technological know-how will be made use of in automobiles thanks from 2025 onward. It refers to these as-however unannounced electric powered motor vehicles as its Neue Klasse.

Though outstanding in its strategy variety, BMW’s choose on the future of auto HUDs is not distinctive. Swiss technological know-how organization WayRay is also doing work on an sophisticated augmented-reality interface for windshields. The corporation statements no other existing HUD can match its 3D imagery, which reveals car speed and variety, mapping, and trajectory along the street in advance. 

Other vehicle OEMs are also working in this space, with Mercedes adding navigation prompts to a are living videofeed from a ahead-struggling with camera, even though the two Audi and Ford are investigating approaches to project driver data on to the street working with LED headlamps. Uncovered in August 2022, Ford’s system is geared toward nighttime driving, wherever prompts warning of speed limits, impending junctions, and icy weather are beamed on to the highway.

A “Friendly” Electronic Companion

Innovative in-automobile assistants are also a hot matter. While some companies would alternatively motorists use Siri or Google Assistant by means of a related smartphone, other folks are also likely their possess way. Nio, a Chinese electric vehicle company with ideas for US and European expansion, has Nomi, a digital assistant whose electronic facial area is housed within just a devoted dashboard display screen that turns to the driver when spoken to.

BMW’s Dee assistant does not have a facial area, at minimum not in the US and Europe, but BMW claims facial expressions could look in the Chinese market place, where by demand from customers for these kinds of technologies is better.

“We want to make a greater statement that is beyond speech recognition,” van Hooydonk suggests. “We want to say that your full vehicle will come to be a companion.” To that finish, the principle shown off in Las Vegas this week also uses e-ink shows in its headlamps to express feelings, possibly to pedestrians and other motorists, or when approached by its operator. BMW statements specific moods like pleasure, astonishment, and approval can be expressed visually.

This so-called welcome situation can also involve the auto projecting an avatar of the driver onto the side window when it detects their presence, BMW says. It is undoubtedly a novel way of spotting your automobile among other individuals in a chaotic parking lot, and jointly with the headlamp facial expressions, you will of training course be reminded of Lightning McQueen from Cars and trucks.

Reductive Structure

The Dee concept by itself is, to our eyes at least, wonderfully retro. It’s a 3-box structure that could have sat awkwardly up versus the supposedly bleeding-edge technological innovation showcased in and out, nonetheless it functions, and is a design we hope BMW can flip into reality as element of its Neue Klasse cars and trucks. From a company criticized for its ungainly iX and tough i7, the compact concept is a breath of fresh air.

Van Hooydonk suggests it’s a form that came from boiling down years of BMW style and design language into “the quintessential BMW features.” “For this motor vehicle we took it to an additional stage and minimized the volume of things considerably, for the reason that we needed the digital areas to acquire middle stage,” van Hooydonk claims.