If you think the glowing fabric in Johnson Controls’ “ID15” interior is just another fruitless concept, think again. Roch de Preneuf, director of business development at EFI Lighting, gave a talk at this week’s WardsAuto Interiors Conference in Detroit, Michigan, where he unveiled that his firm is developing a similar technology and eager to push it to market.
De Preneuf, who was participating in a panel titled “Bright Ideas and Brainstorms,” in which industry pros were discussing interior lighting, said that glowing fabric could lead to greater interior personalization.
Summarizing the event, WardsAuto writes:
Pin spot and linear lighting have their places in automotive interiors, de Preneuf says, but his company’s light-emitting fabric, called Lightex, is the next step. Lightex technology uses optical fibers woven into the fabric, driven by a single LED.
The fabric is thin, lightweight, flexible, can be personalized with different colors and brightness, and can be applied to a variety of leather or fabrics to create an individualized interior ambience.
Future applications might use Lightex to communicate information via light without the driver having to focus on a specific instrument or display.
“It uses a more intuitive part of the brain,” de Preneuf says.
It’s unclear when we’ll start seeing vehicles with optical fibers woven into their fabrics come into our auto upholstery shops for repair. However, one thing is clear: The dawn of smart fabrics is upon us.
Read the full article, “Shedding Light on Future Automotive Illumination,” at WardsAuto.
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