Enhancing the driving experience
Automotive head-up displays (HUD) and augmented reality (AR) HUDs transparently display critical real-time navigation and vehicle data directly within a driver’s line-of-sight, enabling their eyes to remain on the road. Taking the driving experience to the next level, HUDs unlock enhanced perception of the road, ensure safety, inspire driving confidence and are essential for powering the adoption of autonomous driving.
Validating HUD design in minutes
Ansys SPEOS’ cutting-edge features enable rapid HUD development. Embedding optical knowledge and providing seamless interoperation with CAD/PLM environments, SPEOS enables significantly improved HUD development by anticipating issues early in the design process and validating your HUD design’s feasibility in minutes.
Virtually experience and validate
SPEOS delivers a reliable, immersive and lifelike 360-degree simulation of your HUD design, putting you behind the virtual wheel, nearly replicating a real-world driving experience. This empowers you with valuable design insights early in the design process, ensures your HUD satisfies quality requirements and eliminates the need for physical prototypes.
Creating your HUD design
Early-stage validation of HUD design feasibility is challenging as engineers must efficiently design the HUD’s optical system and optimize the quality of the displayed image by satisfying windshield shape and packaging constraints.
SPEOS is an intuitive and user-friendly solution dedicated to optimizing mirror layout and shapes. The resulting optical shapes are generated as native CAD surfaces. Equipped with a CAD connection, SPEOS enables a seamless digital mockup process (DMU) for engineers to easily create complete optical systems.
SPEOS takes advantage of the direct modeling technology, removing geometrical problems associated with various 3D CAD operations, such as design or concept modeling and complete model editing. SPEOS plays a pivotal role for enabling rapid propagation of design changes and quick investigation of ‘what if’ HUD development scenarios.
Additionally, SPEOS helps both optical specialists and automotive engineers perform feasibility studies during the concept phase and iterate quickly with packaging, human factors, and glazing departments. Ansys SPEOS also supports these experts in the engineering phase, enabling them to accurately refine the optical design.
Key benefits:
- Create any optical concept — taking volume constraints into account — in minutes.
- Tackle small to large modeling problems with user-friendly and streamlined commands and workflows.
- Use a seamless DMU process for mechanics and optics with a direct CAD connection.
Qualifying your HUD design with optical analysis
When designing a HUD, the first challenges are to objectively qualify the image quality and analyze the performance of several technical options.
SPEOS is an intuitive application dedicated to scoring optical and visual performance. Its simplified user interface is operable by CAD engineers — from expert to novice — and does not require prior optical design experience. Using its intuitive 3D visualization interface, you will analyze and understand advanced optical concepts associated with virtual image defects.
SPEOS enables you to create, edit and analyze your HUD design without focusing on underlying technology. The analysis becomes fast, easy, flexible and rewarding wherever you need it in the workflow. With streamlined commands, operations that previously required hours are completed in minutes. Fully automated, SPEOS rapidly performs a complete analysis based on thousands of measurements, checking the compliance against your acceptance criteria.
Additionally, SPEOS creates warping data to feed the pre-distortion image correction and supports import of warping information. In both cases, optical metrics are calculated simulating the warping processing of the vehicle’s embedded software, reflecting the optical performance of the complete HUD system.
Key benefits:
- Optical expertise is not required for rapidly preparing, simulating and building.
- Quickly qualify and validate the performances of your HUD design, while factoring in assembly variations
- Leverage an intuitive 3D visualization interface and customizable reports to meet your HUD specifications.
Visualizing your virtual HUD design
Beyond satisfying ergonomic requirements, HUDs must achieve defined perceived quality targets. Once the dashboard, pillars and instrument panel designs are available, you can create a complete simulation from the driver’s perspective to evaluate how the virtual image will be perceived in dynamic driving conditions. Iteration loops between design and review, requiring mere minutes.
This immediate visual feedback enables a real-time assessment of the final aspect of the projected image. This ensures the HUD image attains your perceived quality targets very early in the development process.
Key benefits:
- Simulate the driver’s perspective very early in the process without a physical prototype.
- Simulate any ‘what-if’ scenario and dynamically compare different design options in lifelike conditions.
- Effortlessly plug real-time optical simulations into VR systems.
- Facilitate communication between stakeholders and specialists to support decision making.
Validating your virtual HUD design
Ansys’ holistic simulation toolkit delivers immersive testing and validation solutions of HUD systems throughout your design process. Ansys VRXPERIENCE HMI enables HUD testing, from its early design phases through real-world validation. This virtual system testing environment enables you to evaluate user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) early in the design process by testing your HUD system’s behavior in driving conditions. Focusing on UX development enables you to validate your UI and optimize environmental perception and superimposition.
VRXPERIENCE HMI provides a customized virtual road environment that incorporates traffic variables, weather conditions, vehicle dynamics and lighting to test your HUD system. This empowers you to evaluate your HUD’s registration of traffic elements, analyze and assess perceived lag and determine the optical performance of the whole system, which will directly impact the final UX.
Additionally, this dynamic testing helps define your HUD’s specifications and how resulting constraints will affect its initial UI design and UX.
Key benefits:
- Validate HUD content and optimize UI design early in the development process.
- Drive HUD testing with an immersive real-world experience, delivering highly reliable images with a 3D display and head tracking.
- Engage drivers in the virtual testing and validation to ensure a qualitative end-user experience.
