Continental is increasing its investment in DigiLens, the Silicon Valley-based holographic waveguide projection technology company.
With its additional investment, Continental will hold nearly 18% of DigiLens after Series C financing round. Continental first invested in DigiLens in 2016 and through a partnership to jointly develop a waveguide head-up display (HUD) that fulfils automotive requirements, the technology is now ready for industrialisation.
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DigiLens’ holographic waveguide technology enables head-up displays for different applications including automotive, aviation and motorcycle helmets. The company’s AutoHUD waveguide product transforms the HUD performance by doubling the field of view making a much larger display required for augmented reality applications while reducing the component volume to one-sixth of the traditional size.
“By reducing the size of head-up displays, this waveguide technology truly holds the potential to revolutionise the market,” says Thorsten-Alexander Kern, head of HUD Product Development at Continental’s business unit Instrumentation and Driver HMI and future member of the DigiLens board of directors.
“Seeing the first promising results, we are happy we could increase our investment in DigiLens and further work together in order to bring this technology on the road.”
Instead of using mirrors to direct and magnify the images in a head-up display, the waveguide technology diffracts the light, thus reducing hardware and the volume in the vertical axis. Especially, for large projections, as needed for augmented reality, mirror-based head-up displays require a lot of space in the dashboard of a vehicle, which is mostly not available.
“Based on the waveguide technology, we see potential to realise augmented reality head-up displays also for a broad market,” added Kern.
