Apple may be working on in-car head-up display
Having taken over the devices on our desks and in our pockets, Apple might be moving on to an even bigger screen: the car windshield.
The world’s most valuable company is “very likely” working on a 27- to 50-inch head-up display — a technology most famously used by jet pilots — that could project vivid icons and information for drivers while on the road, a tech analyst with Global Equities Research said.
The curved-glass screen could also be wired with sensors and “may be completely gesture-controlled,” a stealth project that analyst Trip Chowdhry said could be Apple’s “next generation” device, after gadgets such as the iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch.
Apple declined to comment, and Chowdhry said a launch of the head-up display, or HUD, “does not seem imminent.” The glass and display technology, he said, could be used in a totally different type of device, such as a TV, adding that the tech giant seems to be in the “early stage of something that could be a lot bigger.”
Rumours about Apple’s secret innovations have become a regular pastime for the many tea-leaf readers of Silicon Valley, and Chowdhry, who seems to be the only analyst so far to suggest Apple is working on a HUD, has been wrong before.
But if Apple’s head-up display really is in the works, it could mark a huge leap for the $660 billion gorilla into an industry already packed with big-money carmakers and tech firms, and further embolden the idea that Apple is looking to stake new territory on the world’s roads.
Apple’s hiring of auto-industry specialists and sightings in California of Apple-leased camera mounted vans have fuelled rumours that the software-hardware company is looking to build its own kind of car.
But Apple has remained tightlipped about cars, which Apple executive Jeff Williams in May called the “ultimate mobile device.” The Cupertino, California, firm’s sole public foray into the four-wheeled world has been its CarPlay infotainment system, which lets people plug in their iPhones and use iOS-style menus to check maps and music libraries on their car’s dashboard display.