Tech Talk: Can high-tech displays boost feel-good factor?

The 2025 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas flagged up how radical car interiors might become – and sooner rather than later.

Continental showed its Emotional Cockpit concept, which combines high-tech electronics with displays framed by Swarovski crystal, a high-quality cut glass from Austrian firm Swarovski Mobility. 

A floating 12.3 TFT display beneath the centre of the dash is set beneath a transparent crystal surface and forms the control element for both driver and front passenger. The TFT technology has full-array local dimming technology (FALD), which controls the backlighting. FALD is used in LED TVs and divides the LED backlights into zones that can be dimmed in certain areas (hence ‘local’).

LEDs in the brighter areas can be turned up and those in darker areas turned down to create a more vivid image.

In the dashboard itself, there’s a small ‘Widget Crystal’, described as an interaction surface for an AI assistant and interactive widgets that give information on things like weather and location.

The 3.5-inch Widget Crystal is powered by advanced micro-LED technology, which is super-intense but has yet to find its way into mainstream domestic TVs because of the huge cost.

The crystal casings of the displays are designed to create the impression of an image floating inside them and Continental believes there’s a strong business case for this.

According to its user experience team, end users and car makers are both placing greater importance on the emotional attachment owners have to a car.

With that theme in mind, Continental has also revealed its E Ink display, which substitutes ePaper technology for backlit LED displays. Essentially, ePaper is the kind of thing used by Kindle and other tablet readers to get closer to the look of a printed page.

In this case, the technology has been developed by specialist firm E Ink. Here, it is used for a 1.3m-wide, 4cm-tall E Ink prism display that spans the width of the dashboard. Initial prototypes are black and white but the plan is to introduce full colour.

The display is intended to visually enhance the vehicle interior, enable personalisation and provide essential information for driving the car.

The display shown at CES consumes small amounts of power only when switching from one image to the next.

Like its e-reader counterparts, the display doesn’t rely on backlighting like LED screens but instead reflects light like paper.

Because of that, it can display images, graphics and text permanently without consuming any power, although that suggests in low light or darkness some illumination will be needed.

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