Text | Joey
In the era of intelligent cars, what kind of lights can evolve?
In fact, from the very beginning, the function of car lights is very simple, that is, lighting. From the earliest kerosene lamps, to acetylene lamps, from incandescent lamps, to later halogen lamps. They are basically not much different from our daily household lights.
At that time, the drivers' needs were also very simple, to shine a light, so that others could see me, so that I could see others.
Therefore, the more in the era of low demand, as long as one thing is done well, it is completely enough to make people stand out. And Audi, which has mastered this "cosmic truth", has won a name that is highly sung in the industry and fans with the ability to do a good job of headlights - the lamp factory.
Audi was the first car factory to apply xenon headlights, and it was the first to try the configuration of daytime running lights eight years before the European Union issued regulations. Audi's lights are bright, but not glaring, far away, and comfortable to see. This is the origin of the name of Audi 'lamp factory'.
In fact, if the wave of intelligence does not come, I have no doubt that Audi will continue on the road of "light factory". However, I think so, but other manufacturers are not willing to follow. After all, the era of intelligence requires lights with higher technological content, and who can grab this first place can lead the next generation of lamp development.
Laser + camera, lights are used earlier than intelligent driving assistance
Not long ago, I was discussing with my friends what kind of lights are smart lights. His answer was that he could illuminate the night, avoid obstacles, and not affect the people and cars in the opposite direction. These are some of the product features of adaptive headlamps. This kind of adaptive headlight, which can take care of distant and near illumination, can indeed achieve the magical effect of harmless people and animals and illuminating the night.
However, if these are the future directions of the development of car lights, it is obvious that the road is narrowed. After all, many brands of mid-range cars have been equipped with adaptive headlights. So, how can you make the road illuminated by the headlights get wider and wider? Manufacturers with strong technical strength and involvement in intelligent driving assistance technology have set their sights on cameras and lasers many years ago.
In fact, as early as 2013, Volvo developed a lighting system that uses cameras to cooperate with car lights. They used the front windshield and two optical cameras on the front of the car to scan and sense the vehicles and pedestrians on the road in front of the car. The next thing is very simple, the car calculates the obstacles in front of the car, and then automatically blocks part of the light source through the baffle to reduce the interference with the other party.
After years of development, this technology has also continued to make breakthroughs. At CES 2020 (Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas), Osram, which specializes in lighting, unveiled headlights with 1,024 pixels that can be controlled independently. So many independent small lights can ensure that the vehicle can cooperate with the computer, more accurately calculate the area of the headlight opening and closing when facing obstacles, so as to obtain a delicate and more intelligent lighting effect.
Earlier, in 2014 and 2015, also at the CES show, Audi launched laser headlights. In terms of application, the BMW i8 was also equipped with laser headlights in 2014, becoming the first product to apply such lights.
In fact, laser headlights have very good lighting efficiency compared to cameras that hope to achieve more efficient illumination through computers and computers. Through a light emitter with a diameter of only a few microns (one percent of a conventional LED lamp), the laser headlight can bring the advantages of fast response speed, low brightness attenuation, small size, low energy consumption, and long life (theoretical luminous efficiency is 60% higher than that of LED lamps).
However, although various car manufacturers have raised the technology of headlights to a higher level, they are still focused on "lighting". Such a manufacturing concept, and use experience, in the current era, is obviously not enough.
After all, in the era of smart cars, "interaction" is the eternal theme.
Interaction, giving life to the car
In my opinion, the biggest change in the era of intelligent cars is not the continuous advancement of intelligent driving technology, but the gradual transformation of cars into "intelligent life" that can interact with people, such interactions are not only limited to the connection between vehicles and car owners through speech, biometrics, and gesture recognition; more importantly, the interaction between vehicles and vehicles, vehicles and pedestrians.
And to achieve it, the headlights are undoubtedly a good carrier.
At this point, there must be a lot of people like me who think of DLP headlights. Of course, if you don't know what DLP means, you can plainly understand it as LED headlights + smart projectors. That is to say, in the case of inheriting the advantages of the previous adaptive headlight, it can also output images for the purpose of more diverse and clearer interaction.
Such diverse, clear interaction comes from the digital micro-lenses of DLP headlight applications. DLP headlights can warn surrounding vehicles and pedestrians to prevent possible dangers through text, graphics, and even images directly projected by the headlights during driving. At present, the EVIYOS 2.0 headlight technology launched by OSRAM is the technology of this type of DLP headlight.
If in the past, such technology was basically within the scope of output by foreign automobile companies and auto parts technology companies, then now with the development of China's automobile industry, we also have the ability to manufacture such and even better products. For example, Huayu Vision can manufacture very advanced DLP headlights.
At present, many new power brands in China have begun to adopt the DLP headlights of Huayu Vision, including the PML headlights used by Gaohe, which has been listed and has a good sales performance in the luxury new energy vehicle market of more than 500,000 yuan, and the L7 of Zhiji Automobile, which has attracted much attention from the industry and has not yet been officially delivered, and the DLP digital projection headlights used.
In fact, the idea of these two brands is the same, which is to make the car have a better interaction with the outside world, so that the driver's driving behavior and the information they want to convey are more clearly and intuitively known by the outside world. In this process, programmable, interactive headlights are important.
Among them, the headlights used in Zhiji cars are obviously closer to this goal. Relatively speaking, the DLP headlights used in Zhiji Automobile achieve a projection resolution of 2.6 million pixels through a total of 5,000 LED units in front and rear, and a small computing matrix is formed with the AI vision chip with 3 TOPS computing power and the Linux operating system. Through this whole system, it brings powerful display and information interaction capabilities to the headlights.
Such capabilities will be reflected in the mutual transmission of vehicle information on urban roads (such as forward congestion to the rear vehicles); the interaction between vehicles and pedestrians (such as projecting a sidewalk for pedestrians); and the interaction between the navigation of participating vehicles and the driver himself (such as projecting navigation arrows on the road to assist navigation, projecting detected pedestrians, warning drivers, etc.).
Of course, if this is the case, it is still not enough to achieve full interaction between the car and the driver.
Scene expansion is the next step
With the continuous enrichment of the electronic and electrification architecture, vehicle autonomy customization and selection have become the direction that all automakers are exploring in the future. For example, GAC Aean launched the Xingling platform, Nezha Automobile launched the Shanhai platform, and Zhiji's SOA platform also belongs to the same type of platform architecture.
However, the most important purpose of the platform is to expand the room for free combination of cars and create a freer and more flexible car ecosystem. And the headlights, relying on these platforms, also have a more flexible and freer space to build.
This degree of freedom is not only reflected in the fact that manufacturers can upgrade the OTA for the lights at any time. At the same time, it also allows users to have the right to program independently.
With the cooperation of the platform with a higher degree of freedom, the users of Zhiji Automobile can join the co-creation process of the expression of the headlights, and combine and reconstruct various new ways and new functions like Playing Lego bricks. You can also share your custom results with others for download (in fact, this logic is similar to the setting of the chat software's self-created emojis in the past).
Of course, these are still not all, and in the future, the module segmentation of DLP and ISC will become more subdivided, and the control will become more precise. And this will make possible programming more flexible and diverse.
For now, such programming is still at the level of words and simple GIFs, but I believe that the basic elements of conveying information are already in place and formed. In the future, when the brightness of the light, the display pixels continue to increase, the programming method is continuously optimized, and even more unexpected information transmission methods are created today, the lights will truly help the car and become a mobile, intelligent information mid-range.
Obviously, that's what we want to see, about the future of headlights.