It started with the ‘puddle light’ that may have first been introduced with a Range Rover about 15 years ago. This was just a small light under the door mirror which projected a beam of light onto the ground so puddles (or other unpleasant stuff) could be spotted when opening the doors to enter the car.
Eventually other carmakers offered the feature, usually associated with premium and luxury models. From just a spotlight, designers began to get creative and instead of being just for illuminating the ground, they also used the light to cast the brand logo.
Now Bentley has taken the puddle light to the next level with a new technology that not just projects an image on the ground but also enables it to be animated. The new projection system brings the potential for a customer to have a welcome animation for the car, offering a true first step into digital personalisation.
Advanced Digital Light Processing technology
Featured in the exclusive Batur coupe, this is the first automotive application using Advanced Digital Light Processing (DLP) technology, also found in advanced headlights and head-up display systems. The images are created using 3 coloured sources projecting through 5 different lenses and 2 prisms into a highly advanced 8 mm Digital Micromirror Device (DMD). The light signal is then focused through 5 further lenses, displaying the animation on the ground when the doors open.
The DMD is a small silicon chip that consists of 415,800 tiny mirrors. Through the movement of the mirrors, a moving image can be produced. The mirrors themselves are made of aluminium and are 16 microns in width – a fifth of the width of a human hair. As the size of the mirror and hinge is so small, they can react thousands of times per second with each mirror delivering one pixel in the animation.
The image is created by ‘sculpting’ the illumination from the coloured light sources and previous lenses and hitting the mirrors in the ‘on’ position. All mirrors in the ‘off’ position reflect the light into a heat sink within the projector that absorbs the light. The light leaving the DMD chip travels through5 further lens and focuses on the ground.
This new feature is the next step of a journey where Bentley Mulliner continues to innovate and push further the boundaries of technology, to offer customers an even more unique luxury personalisation experience.
Fourth ‘material’
Looking to the future, light will be the fourth material (besides metal, wood and leather) that will play a significant part in Bentley’s design language, as originally demonstrated by the 2019 EXP100 GT concept car with its illuminated front grille.
