It has been quite a few months since we heard about the long-rumored “Apple Car”. Previously, we heard that the Cupertino tech giant is working on “Advanced Headlights” for their car. Now, a recent patent suggests that Apple might embed displays into the windshield and the windows of the Apple Car for easy viewing of information.
The US Patent and Trademark Office recently granted a patent by Apple dubbed “Systems with windows“. This patent by the iPhone-makers suggests that future cars should move the display panels inside the car from dedicated screens to within the glass windows and even the windshield.
How Will It Work?
According to Apple’s patent, cars in the future could use a chemically-strengthened glass layer and a structural window layer to hold an “adjustable optical component layer”. This “optical component layer” can contain any type of a display panel like an LCD panel with a backlight or an OLED panel to display information.
Apart from these layers, the company suggests that more elements can be added in the form of extra layers or with some tweaks to the nearby surfaces of the two glass panels.
Speaking about the glass panels, Apple suggests that they could be using tempered soda-lime glass or aluminosilicate glass for the chemically-strengthened layer. And as the internal layers will be sandwiched in-between the glass layers, they will remain protected from the external elements.
Now, we have seen Apple file an array of patents for its devices. However, most of the technologies do not make their way to the consumer market. Similarly, in the case of this patent, I don’t think that it is coming to the market anytime soon.
Nonetheless, it is pretty exciting to see what kinds of tech future cars will bring with them as more and more companies invest in advanced technologies for the automobile industry.
