What is a car? BMW mixes up all common definitions, picks up on all technology trends of the digital future and presents a study at the CES in Las Vegas that will amaze you. The car is a communication space, it is a tool for virtual and augmented reality, it is the future of the Metaverse and will thus become a digital everyday companion – and perhaps the successor to the smartphone.
That sounds pretty fancy, but many elements of the iVision Dee concept car will soon go into series production. At BMW, Dee stands for Digital Emotional Experience, and this digital emotional experience is initially to be created via the windshield and its head-up display. The car has no cockpit displays and monitors, instead the entire windshield is a huge, spectacular head-up display.
In the car through a virtual parallel world
This is achieved with a coated pane, which is played by micro-LEDs, which are sunk across the entire width of the dashboard. Continental had shown off similar tech last year, and BMW is promising the next-generation super-wide head-up display will be available in production models by 2025.
The body should interact with the environment. It is divided into 240 segments that can represent up to 32 colors.
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Image: manufacturer
But not only that. With touch elements on the dashboard, the driver can change the digital content in the windshield in five stages. At the lowest level, the display is analogue and shows information relevant to driving. In the further stages, the individual components of the infotainment are added and in the top stage the depiction of the shown reality outside changes. Reality is replaced by a virtual parallel world, only the street remains real.
The different stages are called BMW Slider, the entire system should be called Reality Slider. Imagine a trip through the big city. Driving through the rows of houses, the driver sees a completely different picture and believes he is traveling on the country road. Technically it all works, but ultimately the BMW idea is a provocation, also for reasons of road safety.
Flexible: Who is behind the wheel remains a secret. An avatar can be seen on the side window.
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Image: manufacturer
The world is changing, and not just for the driver of the BMW. Those around you may not see an old white man behind the wheel either, but an attractive-looking young avatar whose face is smiling at the pedestrians on the side window.
A vehicle with facial expressions
The body should also interact with the environment. It is divided into 240 segments covered with electrophoretic foils. Behind it is the technology of electronic paper, e-ink. There are millions of microcapsules in the films, which can take on different colors after a brief change in voltage. The iVision Dee allows up to 32 different colors for the 240 segments, so that an infinite number of patterns for the vehicle’s exterior presentation can be generated. BMW had already shown something like this at the CES last year, and now the time it takes to change colors and patterns has been significantly reduced.
The headlights and the BMW kidneys can also change their status using e-ink technology. In this way, “facial expressions can be displayed,” says BMW, and the car can “speak to people and express moods such as joy, astonishment or approval.”
For this purpose, voice recognition and voice communication will be taken to a whole new level. If you can currently ask a luxury-class production vehicle about the weather or the upcoming appointments, the BMW iVision Dee now takes over the conversation itself and starts a little chat. Reminiscences of the TV series “Knight Rider” with the intelligent and talking car KITT send their regards. “My father was an E30,” whispered the iVision Dee to a journalist during the fair. E30 stands for the factory code of the second 3 series from BMW.
