BMW Unveils a car That Changes Color: I Vision Dee

BMW unveiled a pair of concept cars at the Consumer Electronics Show that show how future cars could respond to their owners’ moods with their own.

The two cars, which look essentially the same, are both called the Concept and Vision Dee. Dee stands for Digital Emotional Experience. One version of the car literally has color-changing body panels.

BMW showed off a “color-changing” concept car at CES last year, but it only changed to different shades of gray. This year, the Vision Dee also changes through a whole palette of colors, with different parts of the car’s body displaying different colors at once. Even the wheels change color.

The second concept i Vision Dee was built to showcase new ideas for the “user interface”, the way drivers and passengers interact with the vehicle. In this case, “user interface” doesn’t just mean from inside the car.

Even the exterior, the front of the car, the area around the headlights and the “grille” – which is really a display panel on this car – can show different shapes and shades that create something like facial expressions. According to BMW, the car can display different moods or reactions, such as approval, happiness or amazement.

Of course, the car also has a head-up display, but in both the concept and the Vision Dee, the display stretches across the entire windshield. This particular feature is something that BMW has said it plans to introduce to actual production vehicles starting in 2025.

As with other see-through displays, the projected images, which might contain navigational cues or multiple images involved, would typically be mostly transparent.

Images can be projected in the concept car, but also on the side windows. For example, the driver can choose a digital avatar that can be projected onto the side window as part of the welcome display as the driver approaches the vehicle.

The type of content, from basic driving information to cartoon characters, that appears on the head-up and window displays is controlled by a slider on the dashboard, which itself is just a projection. Instead of physical controls or a permanent touchscreen, the “Mixed Reality Slider,” as BMW calls it, is projected onto the dashboard while sensors on the surface detect the movement of a finger across the control.

Using the control, the user can choose from five different levels of digital content in the window view. Levels range from the most basic driving information to augmented reality information about what’s outside – to fully virtual worlds that cover everything outside. (The fully virtual experience is probably for use when the car isn’t moving.)

Even the Vision Dee is more of a sedan than an SUV, like last year’s CES concept, because the sedan remains “at the core of the BMW brand,” the automaker said in its announcement.

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