A new driving experience with the head-up display (HUD)

Today's cars have more and more cool features: automatic yaw assist, rear view camera, electric lift button, traction control.

Of course, car owners don't have to drill under the hood to see that the new generation of cars is equipped with a variety of high-tech technologies that were not available in the past.

Advances in these technologies go far beyond adding comfort features such as in-car wireless connectivity to personal environment conditioning systems, and many new technologies are designed around data sensing and processing (the so-called Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) )) to ensure that drivers have a more comprehensive understanding of road conditions and real-time surroundings.

Understand driving data

For OEMs, the biggest challenge for the development of ADAS is how to make drivers clearly see all kinds of driving data while ensuring safety.

As head-up displays (HUDs) begin to become increasingly hot car configurations, drivers will begin to experience new experiences in the surrounding environment. This new experience will revolutionize the way drivers interact with the car and the surrounding environment while driving.

Compared to traditional car dashboards, HUDs are smarter and display the driving information that drivers need to know at the right time and position. This information can be direct data such as speed, route, alarm and rear view images, or data such as crash pre-alarm and lane detection.

Through the HUD, the driver of the vehicle can read the data without having to look back from the road. All data will be displayed on the windshield in a position that is most comfortable for the driver.

What are the new features of HUD?

Many OEMs have now deployed some form of HUD in their cars. However, with the advancement of key HUD technologies, car manufacturers who understand the potential of HUD are beginning to have higher demand.

These factors include a wider driving field of view (FOV), augmented reality, higher display contrast and resolution. In particular, FOV - a broader driving line of sight, with augmented reality technology, will have the potential to become the winning rule of HUD technology. The new display resolution, like our DLP® technology, allows OEMs to display more information such as navigation lights, real-time signposts, etc., and expands the driving field of view to a width of 12 degrees, almost twice as much as before. This field of view will cover the real world view.

The future of HUD

Obviously, cars equipped with ADAS functionality require a more optimized way to display this data. HUD is undoubtedly the most optimized display.

Advances in HUD technology, especially the wider driving horizon, mean that it will replace traditional car dashboards sooner or later, becoming the basic way for drivers to understand the car and its surroundings. A report by the survey company IHS Motors shows that the global annual sales of HUD-equipped cars in 2012 was 1.2 million units, and by 2020, this number is expected to reach 9.1 million units.

EvoCar demo, for example, is a powerful test platform that we can test for a variety of driver-assisted TI technologies.

According to rumors, cars equipped with HUD will be highly sought after by consumers. Like the cruise control and reversing images, the car owners will only recognize the necessity if they have really experienced the HUD. We have seen car owners who have experienced the HUD function, and the cognition of this function has quickly changed from “having better” to “not being impossible”.

We will continue to work with world-renowned OEMs to provide them with DLP projection technology to enable the car to have the latest HUD display capabilities. However, everything is based on the needs of car manufacturers and car owners, which will ultimately determine HUD's performance in the market.

In the next few years, OEMs will be able to assemble HUDs into cars in a variety of creative and innovative ways. This alone is exciting.