Last week, the lighting & ADAS community gathered in Paris for the biennial SIA VISION congress (SIA is the Société des Ingénieurs de l’Automobiles, French for association of automotive engineers). 430 people talked and listened about the future of our fields. Since the beginning of VISION, the focus of the event has been safety, especially in bad weather conditions, and a lot of presentations focused on this. To close the event, I worked to summarize the two-day event into a list of salient points:
- Glare: In France, the LAB (incident tracking laboratory) mentioned that over the three years spanned by the study, 166 fatalities involved drivers affected by glare, that represents 2.5 per cent of total traffic fatalities, while in 2011 it represented only 0.4 per cent.
- A lot of lectures about glare reductions (automatic lamp aiming, better bad weather detection, HD light to reduce glare to oncoming drivers…)
- Lighting can improve camera and ADAS sensor detection, mainly with intelligent use of PWM signal, with basic signalling (Valeo/NXP demo for example) and lighting functions and HD light (TU Dortmund, LLAB…)
- Signalling and lighting projection can improve safety (ESTACA school study with turn indicator projection for trucks, Renault study for marker light in foggy weather to detect pedestrians, Koito study about Toyota Corolla turn indicator projection…)
- Regulations must change faster to permit new features, and especially should be changed to permit new features after vehicle certification during vehicle lifetime, now possible with OTA updates.
- SDV is coming, but AI-DV SD-L (lighting) is now the future.
- A need for EE standardization between OEMs, tier-1s, and tier-2s may facilitate deployment of innovation with new standards and we see a need for discussion between competitors.
- Lighting is and will remain a key differentiator for OEMs as a design element.
- Innovation is still the engine of our community. As an example, during the event, Audi revealed the launch of microLED 100K and the Digital OLED 3.0 with more than 500 segments.
VISION is known for its demo car session. Always a great pleasure to see OEMs and tier-1s bringing their cars and lamp engineers scrutinizing the details during the ride-and-drive!
We will publish an extensive report about SIA VISION next month. This week we are glad to publish a long summary about the DVN Shanghai event, including a visit to Xiaomi lighting I did just before the event. Thank you to all the DVN team members who worked hard to make this report happen!
