THE DETROIT METRO CHAPTER OF THE SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION Display (SID) held its 29th Annual Vehicle Displays and Interfaces Symposium and Exposition (VDS) as an in-person event September 27 and 28 in Novi, Michigan. While not completely returning to pre-pandemic levels, VDS 2022 had 539 registered in-person attendees and 51 exhibitors. The annual symposium is designed to disseminate information among designers, engineers, scientists, technologists, researchers, and system integrators of land, air, sea, and space vehicle displays and display components. The conference has become a primary venue for information exchange among experts in the automotive display industry. “We are pleased to report that this year, paper submissions increased by 45 percent and exhibits by 29 percent,” said Silviu Pala, chair of VDS. “The main objective of the conference is to provide an annual forum for automotive original equipment manufacturers (AOEM), industry, and academia. Participants had an opportunity to review and debate topics related to vehicle displays and related interfaces. We were excited to present so many innovations, particularly in the areas of head-up displays and new display solutions for both auto interiors and exteriors.” The event's popular automotive-focused market session was chaired by Pala and Michael Boyd from Yazaki North America. Expert market analysts included Brian Rhodes of S&P Global (formerly IHSMarkit), Jennifer Colegrove of Touch Display Research, Bob O'Brien of Display Supply Chain Consultants (DSCC), and You Xiang Wu of Omdia Research. There also was an exhibition featuring companies from the vehicle display industry, with a block of time dedicated to exhibitor presentations. Each year at the VDS, the Detroit Metro chapter also presents Academic Awards to graduate students performing research into display technology (Fig. 1). Bob O'Brien of DSCC with student award winners Yakshita Malhotra (center) and Shaghayegh Yaraghi (right). The symposium kicked off with a keynote address from Andrew Poliak, chief technology officer of Panasonic Automotive Systems. In describing issues for vehicle display design, Poliak drew inspiration from the art world, describing the “vehicle as a canvas.” When discussing the goal of user experience (UX) design, he said, “Activate contextually relevant information when needed, and exclude what's not needed.” Poliak reviewed many aspects of UX design, including not only flat-panel displays inside the vehicle, but also augmented reality head-up displays (AR-HUDs) and even exterior displays (Fig. 2). Innovation of meaningful user experiences. Source: Panasonic Automotive Systems Rhodes provided an update on automotive production and inventory, which has been constrained because of supply-chain shortages. Dealer inventories in the United States were at 1.1 million units or a 27-day supply as of August 2022, a shortage of 1.5 million compared to normal levels. S&P expects North American auto production to increase from 14.6 million in 2022 to 15.6 million in 2023 and 16.2 million in 2024, but there are concerns that a potential recession before 2024 could reduce demand. The lead time for automotive semiconductors has increased continually since the start of the pandemic but recently is plateauing at a level that is 3.5 to 4 times longer than pre-pandemic levels. Rhodes shared results of an S&P eight-country consumer survey of human-machine interface (HMI) factors, with both positive and negative elements. On the plus side, consumers agree that these systems enhance the driver experience, and “the type of infotainment system in my next car will be an important purchasing decision.” However, they also expressed concerns that auto systems are outdated compared to consumer devices, and the systems are plagued by software bugs and reliability issues. Rhodes then shared his company's forecast for automotive displays, highlighting the growth in both units and screen size. Flat-panel display shipments are expected to increase by 38 million from 2022 to 2028, and the number of 9-inch and larger displays is expected to double over that period to 87 million. He highlighted the increased size and complexity of the main flat-panel displays in cars. For the instrument cluster display (ICD), the most common display in 2022 was a 4.2-inch LCD with a 320 × 240 resolution. By 2028, the most common ICD will be a 12.3-inch LCD with a 1,920 × 720 resolution. In 2022, the most common center stack display (CSD) was an 8-inch with an 800 × 480 resolution, but by 2028, the most common CSD will be a 12.1-inch with a 1,280 × 720 resolution (Fig. 3). Interior displays dominate vehicle's interior design. Source: S&P Global Mobility Rhodes expects HUD to be increasingly important in the auto display space. S&P's consumer research revealed that consumer awareness of HUD has increased to 77 percent, and of those aware of HUD, 89 percent are interested in buying a car with this feature. S&P expects that HUD volumes will increase by 11 million units between 2022 and 2028 to more than 19 million units, to approximately 20 percent of all autos. Most HUD volume, though, will be simpler box-HUD designs, with less than 4 million units of AR-HUD. In a session on new display solutions, Kimberly Peiler of AMS Osram described the requirements for LED design for LCDs with local dimming. Whereas edge LEDs use a top-emitting design, LEDs for direct backlighting need to use a side-emitting design, which allows for better uniformity and a slimmer design (Fig. 4). LED illumination profile with top- and side-emitting chip designs. Source: AMS Osram. Paul Weindorf, Visteon Display Technical Fellow, presented two papers on auto image enhancement, addressing the problem of daytime reflections. With a white shirt reflecting sunlight, display luminance that was reflected with the power off was 387 nits. For a display with a peak luminance of 1,000 nits and an 8-bit gray scale, all the gray shades <150 (out of 255) will not be visible and will be wasted. An adapted image enhancement solution reassigns the gray shades in the display to restore visibility. Visteon has designed a system to compensate, using light sensors to determine the reflected background luminance and adjusting the lower gray shades dynamically as a function of reflected background luminance. Graeme Gordon of Ceres Holographics gave a tutorial on a new HUD design using holographic optical elements (HOEs) to enable a transparent HUD display on the windshield. The Ceres design does not allow AR-HUD because the image is displayed in the plane of the windshield. However, the design allows for a reduced light engine package, which is a critical parameter in integrating HUDs into the dashboard. The Ceres design can be implemented in an automobile with a conventional dashboard housing, but alternatively can be housed in the cabin roof for trucks and buses, which have more upright windshields. The Ceres design uses a digital light-processing projector for the image. In the Expo, Ceres collaborated with Eastman, which supplies the windshield lamination. Koichi Kishimoto of Dexerials presented a new phosphor film for miniLED backlight designs. The film uses a KSF phosphor for red and a new phosphor with composition SrGa2S4:Eu (SGS) for green. Dexerials claims that the SGS phosphor has a narrower full-width half maximum (FHWM) than conventional Beta-SiAlON phosphor, and it has a slightly lower peak emission at 537 nm. Dexerials said that the combination of SGS and KSF phosphors can deliver 95 percent of the NTSC color gamut, which compares to only 73 percent with YAG phosphors. Dave Lamb and others from 3M gave a presentation with some surprising results about near infrared (NIR) illumination. 3M makes filters that obscure NIR sensors; the filters need to be opaque to visible light but allow high transmission of NIR. Because the human eye has some (quite low) sensitivity to NIR wavelengths up to 1,060 nm, a filter for hiding NIR needs to trade off the remaining visibility of the sensor against the transmissivity of the filter. In tests, every participant could see a 940-nm LED; it appears as a red glow. Matt Scholz of Radiant Vision Systems described some challenges in measuring smart glass sunroofs. While not exactly a display, sunroofs increasingly are used for exotic styling, such as the BMW i7 (Fig. 5), which uses LEDs and etched channels to create attractive designs. The sunroof then becomes equivalent to a large (exceeding 1 meter diagonal) display; with such a large display, it becomes a challenge to have a wide enough field of view (FoV) of the sensor. Radiant achieves this with a special high-resolution 61 MP sensor in its colorimeter. Sunroof of the BMW i7. The longest session of the symposium covered AR HUD, which is getting a tremendous amount of development work. Sunghwan Choi of the Smart Mobility Lab of LG Electronics presented work on consumer studies of AR-HUD usage. LG found that the optimum lookdown angle for the AR image is at 2.5 degrees; this allows the HUD image to cover the distance between a collision warning activation at 15 m and navigation guidance at 150 m. LG also found that while users have some tolerance for visual error in the AR image, that tolerance is less than 0.4 degrees on average. Finally, LG proposed a system for redundancy in case of a system malfunction, which would allow for simplified AR features. Orkun Oguz of CY Vision presented his company's system for 3D pupil tracking for AR HUD. The system uses two imagers to precisely locate the driver's eyes and uses eye tracking to deliver images to two smaller eye boxes. This approach delivers many advantages in the HUD optical system, including the smallest volume for a specific FoV, but it requires accurate eye tracking. Oguz described the challenges of this eye tracking, including nighttime driving with eyeglasses (which can cause reflections from oncoming car headlights) and a mask, but Oguz claimed that the CY Vision tracking system still could reliably track the driver's pupils. Kyocera showed their AR HUD model driven by a 4.1-inch LCD with full-array local dimming (FALD). The display was described as having 200 dimming zones. FALD removes the “postcard” effect, whereby the gray area of the display outline is visible even if there is no content. BOE demonstrated several displays with new technologies: BOE 21.6-inch curved miniLED display. Nagase exhibited a colorless polyimide (CPI) suitable for plastic LCD. The company's ATM-050 CPI is applicable for miniLED LCD, dual-cell LCD, and bottom-emission plastic OLED. The company showed a posterboard only, not a working prototype of curved LCDs. Tianma demonstrated the following new technologies: Japan Display Inc. (JDI) has a single dashboard in production in the United States for an electric vehicle company (not Tesla). The combined 34-inch dashboard has three displays with left and right freeform touch, and the center had a more conventional 13.4-inch LCD (Fig. 7). Japan Display single dashboard. In a separate exhibit, JDI had its Rælclear transparent LCD. The technology uses RGB sequential-edge LEDs and claims 84 percent transmissivity. AUO showed a 22-inch passenger display with active privacy and in-cell touch with a 3000R curvature and, more impressively, a 1,920 × 960 resolution and 9.4-inch flexible microLED. The microLED was based on a low-temperature polycrystalline silicon (LTPS) backplane and was capable of curvature, with R = 300 mm (Fig. 8). AUO 9.4-inch flexible microLED display. Sharp demonstrated a 13.2-inch + 12.4-inch combination display for the dashboard. The left display is intended as an ICD and the right display as a CSD with in-cell touch. The combination includes an Asahi hot-forming cover glass and a bend radius of 700 mm. Via Optronics demonstrated its three-panel dashboard design, which uses cold-formed Corning Gorilla Glass for Automotive. The dashboard is in production for a China-based OEM and includes a radius with a 700-mm bend on the left side and a 3,000-mm bend on the right. Via's dashboard takes advantage of the cold-form cover glass, which allows the touch sensor lamination and optical bonding on a flat surface that then is secured with a jig (Fig. 9). Via Optronics dashboard. The various offerings at VDS 2022 provided fascinating insights into the designs and innovations being prototyped and implemented in vehicles. By exclusively focusing on advancing electronic display and visual information technologies, SID provides a unique platform for industry collaboration, communication, and training in all related technologies while showcasing the industry's best new products. Robert J. (Bob) O'Brien is the co-founder, principal, and CFO of DSCC. O'Brien has decades of experience turning market and business analysis into strategic insights in the display and electronics industries. At DSCC, he has the lead role in the analysis of display materials, including glass and AMOLED materials, and covers developments in TV and other large-screen display applications. He is the principal author of DSCC's “AMOLED Material Report,” the “Advanced TV Shipment Report,” and the “Display Glass Report,” and he contributes regularly to the DSCC Weekly Review.