November 5, 2019, Las Vegas, US - Hyperformance Glass Products (HGP) unveiled super tough Ford F-150 windshield featured with LUMINEQ in-glass head-up display at SEMA Show 2019.
HGP was showing off the toughness of Gorilla Glass by firing frozen balls of ice at 70 miles an hour to the F-150 windshield with laminated LUMINEQ display inside. It lasted for three days and there was no damage. The test was to demonstrate the resilience of the windshield and the in-glass head-up display against road impacts.
Video: originally from news "2019 SEMA trade show highlights new tech and safety products"
LUMINEQ transparent display has been laminated in the windshield as digital gauges in glass. It is protected by the windshield, which has been tested and proven to be 2.5x tougher than a traditional soda-lime windshield. In certain instances where the glass has broken with LUMINEQ display in it, the display is still working. So even if the exterior glass does break, our technology is still robust enough to function.
The transparent in-glass display shows three gauges side by side. The top left displays transmission temperature and water temperature. In the middle, it can be RPM or speed. And then on the far right is oil pressure. Booth visitors were excited about it because they haven't seen this technology in glass before. So what typically happens is there's a projected HUD which takes up between seven and nine liters of space in the dashboard. So lots of space, lots of programming. It has to be tuned. Before with projected HUD technology, the driver had to be in a sweet spot in order to see it. With ours, there's no sweet spot.
Automotive customers are looking forward to integrating it into future vehicles as part of their aftermarket upgrades to their vehicles. We've been manufacturing displays for over 35 years and a lot of our displays in the past for military and medical applications. It's perfect for automotive applications as well.
"Here we have our F-150 windshield with the LUMINEQ display which is what we refer to as gauges in glass.
This is a thin-film electroluminescent display, and some of its benefits are that it is up to 1500 nits which is brighter than any projected HUD.
The technology that is embedded in this particular windshield is very sophisticated. LUMINEQ and Beneq are the leaders in that technology, and that’s why we’ve decided to partner with them.
With this ultra-rugged, hyper tough product, we can now put our gauges into the glass and sell directly to consumers.
One of the questions we have been getting a lot in the show is that if this is a sticker or not, and it is not a sticker. What it is is a very robust technology, and it’s manufactured on glass, and we have to manufacture on a glass substrate, because our processing temperatures go up to 500℃. No plastic would survive that.
And the reality is that it is a very new technology, and no one has ever seen it before, and we are able to bring this to market, and people just want to understand how it works and how can they really get it in their vehicle.
The display in the glass is thin-film electroluminescent display; it’s 80% transmissive, so it shows information very clearly.
Our displays are solid-state inorganic phosphor, so they can be cut to any shape as long as we know that ahead of time. It also has a 1 millisecond response rate, and that’s across the entire gamut of temperature, -100℃ to +105℃, so our technology is completely independent of temperature. Lifetime is 100,000 hours to 85% brightness, and that’s also independent of temperature. We are not susceptible to humidity or UV, we don’t have degradation from sun exposure, so that’s what makes it perfect for any type of exterior glass application.
This design is a great example of what we can do, but we can do other things; we can do individual gauges that then can be programmed with software to show different information, like depending on what the driver wants to see.
The gauges can be customizable, it will be open source, plugging into the OBDII so the end users then can tweak the product. Right now we have the ability to link up to 7 different independent displays reading simultaneously from one chip.
We see for racers, they really would like to have the information along the A-pillar, so we can also embed our technology in the A-pillar or even down here where a typical HUD has been, so it just depends on where the driver wants there.
What information they want to see can be adjusted depending on the driver and the software, but imagine for a fleet, if you can have warning signals, so either blind spot indication, turn signals that are on, indications of your time to your next stop, those types of things can really help da fleet.
It’s really a safety factor for a fleet vehicle or a transport getting warning lights, speed, the really big things to get information and warning in front of the drivers, so that they can see it quicker, keep their eyes on a road.
For EMS and for police cars, it can give estimated times or better ways to get there, if there is construction or traffic or better rounds available that they don’t know of, so it can give immediate updates of that information as opposed to having to look down and off of the windshield. So it keeps that information in front and center, so they are much safer, traffic around them is much safer, and they can more easily get to their job.
Other applications for our technology are within architecture glass, for entry into conference rooms, identification of conference rooms within office spaces, rear window pieces, above like a charge port for an electric car, but we see a lot of applications where driver identity needs to be confirmed or passenger identity needs to be confirmed.
With our technology, there’s no polarizers, there is no filters, it’s a true 360° viewing angle, so no matter where you are in the car or even outside the car, you can see from this angle, you can see the display clearly.
Our technology can be embedded in the glass, so then that allows for the data to be front and center, in front of the driver. It hasn’t been able to be there quite in this fashion before."
