After the car whose paint absorbs light, the car that changes colors in black and white, BMW has just unveiled a vehicle capable of changing colors on a palette of 32 colors.
Multicolored squares, then a variation from yellow to green to white, to red, to blue. No, it’s not the last TV or smartphone screen presented this week at CES in Las Vegas, but a car. A BMW more specifically, the i Vision Dee–Dee concept for “Digital Emotional Experience”.
32 body colors
The German manufacturer unveiled this Wednesday in Nevada this prototype capable of changing color, and beyond displaying a lot of information on its entire surface. The body of the new prototype can thus display a whole palette of colors, uniformly, in bands or in checkerboards.
32 shades are available, 30 more than the concept presented last year, already at CES, which varied its shade from a light color to a darker one, only on a gray palette.
This variation in shades is made possible thanks to a film, the “e-Paper”. The vehicle body is divided into segments, managed by an electronic control unit developed by E Ink. BMW has worked on the adaptation to the bodywork and the animation program.
This device then makes the body fully customizable. “Passengers can choose from 32 colors to shape ‘Dee’ however they like,” says BMW. in a press release.
A head-up display across the width of the windshield
If the color variations are impressive, so is what happens inside the i Vision Dee’s cabin. The information is then projected over the entire width of the windscreen, for a new generation head-up display, with a more or less large size of the information projected.
BMW also mentioned the possibility of projecting images in augmented reality, or even transforming the entire windshield into a screen, technologies supposed to make it possible to mix “the real and virtual worlds”.
Occupants can choose the proportion of digital content they wish to see appear on the head-up display, but also which information displayed, beyond driving information. Passengers can also “play” with the brightness in order to cut themselves off from the outside.
First elements from 2025
The idea with this concept is to create through a set of software a “companion” offering a personalized experience, said the boss of the group, Oliver Zipse. The possibility of projecting information such as speed and direction over the entire width of the windshield, for example, will be available from 2025, specifies AFP.
The vehicle remains for the moment in the state of prototype. But certain technologies may gradually arrive in the group’s new models.
