Apple may have abandoned its Apple Car project, but it continues to be granted patents for automotive technology. The latest is a patent for “Systems With Adjustable Lights.”
About the patent
Obviously, automobiles and other vehicles have lights such as headlights. To accommodate different driving conditions, headlights are sometimes provided with adjustable settings such as low beam and high beam settings.
Apple wants the illumination provided by the headlights allows vehicle occupants to view the objects at night or in other dim ambient lighting conditions and facilitates the operation of sensors. For example, headlight illumination at visible and/or infrared wavelengths may be used to provide illumination for image sensors that are used by an autonomous driving system or driver’s assistance system.
Summary of the patent
Here’s Apple’s abstract of the patent: “A system may have lights for providing illumination. The lights may be electrically adjustable so that the color and pattern of the illumination may be varied. Sensor data and/or other data may be used in determining how to adjust the lights.
“A light may have a light source such as a white light source or multicolored light source, a light collimator that receives light from the light source, and an adjustable lens array that receives collimated light from the light collimator and outputs corresponding adjustable vehicle illumination. The adjustable lens array may have fixed and/or adjustable lens elements and corresponding electrically adjustable light modulator elements.”
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