With only four words, and three are enough in English, almost everything essential about this car is said: optical camouflage technology.
For those who travel in it, the vehicle becomes transparent, disappears camouflaged behind a large screen as a window.
The vehicle, a true exercise in style (and technique), is called Kyocera Moeye and three things stand out from it, at least at first glance: its exterior appearance - perhaps designed precisely to attract attention -, its gigantic interior screen and its own origin: it has been created by Kyocera, a company that manufactures everything from printers to mobile phones, through solar cells, LCD screens and digital cameras.
The prototype — it will probably stay that way — wants to look like a 1950s model on the outside, but it is an autonomous car with a nearly 47-inch screen: a holographic assistant with 3D technology.
Apart from the fact that the main controls of the car can be operated from it and access to entertainment content, it has the ability to camouflage the entire dashboard and the A-pillars (those that separate the windshield from the front windows) projecting the real image of the road.
Users, if they want, will only see in front of them a large and false window to the outside.
Either the map or a movie.
The screen eliminates the steering wheel and the cabin is a comfortable room to travel without a driver, but with surround sound (through speakers with piezoelectric vibration, including in the headrests) and aromas on demand, up to five to choose from.
Without going into details, Kyocera only says that all the technology of the Moeye is its own.
REINVENTING THE CAB
Nothing is known about autonomous driving systems, for example, because the heart of the Kyocera is its screen / dashboard and what this implies for the uncertain future of autonomous cars: screens will take almost all the limelight.
It is intuited that they will be spaces to show advertising and project films or sensations.
Harman, a subsidiary of Samsung, unveiled its massive QLED MoodRoof at CES in Las Vegas 2018, designed so that the occupants of an automated vehicle simply stare at the ceiling.
The Music Motivator system, depending on the moods, will be in charge of choosing the soundtrack.
That same year, Harman showed its Digital Cockpit platform, a scalable multimedia center with 5G connectivity that, at its best, also reaches the entire dashboard.
And with augmented reality, voice control and haptic feedback: the touchscreen gives the user the impression that they are actually pressing a physical button.
The Kyocera prototype offers the same thing: that feeling that there is what is not really there, and vice versa.
Same as autonomous driving: expected for now, but delayed.
Honda has announced for March 2021 the marketing of the Legend with a level 3 of autonomy (automated driving on motorways and highways up to 60 km / h, that is, in traffic jams), and the same is offered by the newly released Mercedes S-Class and Tesla is developing a new version of Autopilot (with hardware 21 times more powerful than the previous one), but the Digital Auto Report 2020 study, published in November by the consulting firm PwC, lowers the excitement: level 5 autonomous cars (capable of driving completely alone), they will represent 1% of the models sold in Europe ... in 2035.
