One of the features of Drive.ai, a self-driving car startup acquired by Apple back in 2019, was the use of external displays intended to let pedestrians and other road users know what the car was doing. A new patent for Apple Car external displays shows how the Cupertino company might improve on this tech.
Drive.ai first fitted external displays to its test vehicles back in 2016, and improved on them in 2018, but Apple thinks more needs to be done …
The need for external displays
One of the challenges with self-driving cars is that it can be difficult for other road users to judge their intentions.
With a human driver, you can make eye contact to check whether they have seen you, and you can each use gestures like waving a pedestrian to cross, or inviting another car to turn across your path while you wait. Or my own favorite ploy with a driver who doesn’t seem inclined to cooperate: a smile and a preemptive wave of thanks, which usually results in them then doing the thing for which they’ve been thanked.
Drive.ai – a startup that specialized in retro-fitting self-driving tech to existing vehicles – decided back in 2016 that the solution to this was to fit external displays, as cofounder Carol Reiley told Wired at the time.
“We need to be able to communicate in all directions, and we need to be able to show intention and have a conversation with the other players on the road,” Drive.ai co-founder and president Carol Reiley told WIRED back in 2016, when the company was starting to test with roof-mounted “billboards” that could display messages. For the Frisco pilot, the Nissan vans will have panels mounted on all sides to say things like “Waiting for you to cross,” “pulling over,” and “passengers entering.”
Apple’s patent solves a problem with these displays
External displays of the type used by Drive.ai work well in low-light conditions, but can be hard to read in bright sunlight. That’s an issue addressed by a new Apple patent spotted by Patently Apple.
The exterior display may routinely be operated in daytime conditions where sunlight levels are very high. If care is not taken, the bright sunlight may reduce contrast and wash out the display content. To preserve contrast in an exterior display, the display may be covered by a one-way filter that includes a microlens array and a mask with a plurality of holes. The microlens array may focus display light through the holes in the mask, allowing the display light to be visible to a viewer. At the same time, the mask may block the majority of sunlight, preventing reflections from washing out the display light.
The most obvious approach would be for the masking material to be black, but Apple’s patent explains that this isn’t necessary – it is the masking itself which provides the contrast. Counterintuitively, it could even have a mirrored finish!
As yet another option, the masking layer may have a high specular reflection. With this type of arrangement, ambient sunlight is reflected towards the ground (away from the viewer) to preserve display contrast and the display has a mirror-like appearance in the off state.
Apple says that the displays could use a mix of text and symbols to more closely mimic human interactions, such as a raised hand.
As always, we caution that Apple patents a great many things, most of which never make it to market. In this case, there’s additional uncertainty given that nobody knows the company’s eventual plans for self-driving tech, quite possibly Apple included.
One thing is for sure: Should an Apple Car be fitted with exterior displays, they would be integrated with the bodywork in a far sleeker way than the above example!
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