Danger, turning, emergency signs and much more: all projected onto the road, in front of the car, with luminous warnings that increase the safety of interaction with other vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians.
This is what Audi’s new Digital Matrix LED headlights, already standard on the e-tron Sportback and Audi A8, manage to do. In practice, they adopt DMD (Digital Micromirror Device) technology, also used for professional video projectors: the main component is a chip equipped with about 1.3 million micro-mirrors, whose sides measure a few thousandths of a millimeter.
Thanks to the generation of an electrostatic field, each micro mirror can change orientation up to 5,000 times per second. Depending on the position, the LED light is projected along the road or captured by an absorber so as to generate shaded areas.
A few examples? In combination with the Night Vision system, the “signal light” – in the presence of a pedestrian – “shoots” a beam of light to highlight it, reducing the risk that people on the roadside will not be seen. Last but not least, the dynamic animations Leaving Home and Coming Home, linked to unlocking the doors and exiting the car, projected along a wall or on the ground, are no less hi-tech, capable of transforming the space in front of the car into a stage. light. Through the MMI, customers can select up to five choreographies.
And then there is the projection on the ground of the direction indicators: three symbols projected on the asphalt, both in the front and in the rear area of the car, will warn other road users, for example cyclists, of an imminent change of lane, or they will signal to pedestrians that the car is about to turn.
Not only that: when the car is stationary, if a road user – pedestrians and cyclists included – approaches within two meters, the parking sensors register the movement and turn on all the headlights.
by Vincenzo Borgomeo