Autonomous cars in the future require a rethink when it comes to communicating with other drivers or pedestrians. This is where Osram, the leading supplier globally for vehicle lighting, comes into play. It’s teamed with Ringspeed which is a Switzerland-based and renowned for pumping out visionary concept cars, in this case the Oasis.
The Oasis is on display here at the CES in Las Vegas and showcases how lighting will be the key to how either driverless or autonomous cars will communicate with the outside world. It features the best in Osram technology, with a host of Multi-LED modules for the headlights allowing for possible animation sequences, such as welcome lights and the ability to sync the lights with other functions the car may need to perform.
Future driverless cars will most likely use the kind of Osram technology enabling high-resolution, information rich and advanced illumination patterns. The Oasis for example features two auxiliary forward lighting LED projection modules that can welcome the driver to the vehicle, provide unsurpassed illumination of the road ahead and help communicate with the surrounding environment. For example pedestrians or cyclists will be warned when they’re seen by the car.
Osram has suggested the LED-based systems could possibly have some kind of entertainment value while the vehicle is at rest. It could project a movie onto an outside surface. The value of that I’ll never understand, I thought the drive-in was dead.
As for the Oasis car itself, well it’s another runabout style electric vehicle designed purely for city use. It has an Augmented Reality window screen, thinks about the best route home before you even get in and has a garden plot for lovely things such as Bonsai plants, yep true story.