Head Up Display Overview

The Head Up Display feature allows you to create, analyze and validate HUD systems.

A Head-Up Display (HUD) is a system that displays an image in the field of view of the driver. Usually this image is used to give information to the driver (the car speed for example).

From design to experience, Speos HUD feature encompasses several sub features dedicated to every step of the HUD system analysis:

  • Design: HUD Optical Design (HOD) allows you to model the HUD system in the CAD interface.
  • Analyze: HUD Optical Analysis (HOA) allows you to analyze the HUD system by providing a detailed report and metrics describing the overall optical system's performance.
  • Experience: Visualize and experiment your system to anticipate errors and control the quality of the HUD system. Use Speos features to visualize the virtual image as perceived by the driver, appraise polarization effects, observe stray light or simulate PGUs using TFT or DLP technologies.

HUD Optical Design (HOD)

HOD creates the optical system for automotive head-up displays.

The optical shapes of mirrors and eventually combiner are optimized to provide the best virtual image quality according user defined criteria and from inputs such as:

  • Eyebox: position, size, different drivers size
  • Windshield: inner surface
  • Relative position of optical components: distance, orientation
  • Target image: distance, look over angle, look down angle, field of view

The resulting optical shapes, generated as native surfaces, are naturally compatible with geometric operations of the CAD platform. HOD provides a seamless solution to achieve a complete optical system and avoids the inevitable drawbacks caused by the usage of separate tools (accuracy losses, manual transfer operations, multiple product definitions and specific process for mold design).

It takes advantage of the standard capabilities of the CAD platform such as direct modeling and features associativity enabling rapid propagation of design changes and quick investigation of ‘what if’ scenarios.

Thanks to a dedicated user interface, HOD is not restricted to optical specialists and enables automotive engineers to perform feasibility studies at concept phase thanks to iteration loops with packaging, human factors and glazing departments. HOD also supports the engineering phase for optical design refinement by experts.

HUD Optical Analysis (HOA)

HOA allows you to quantify the quality of virtual image of automotive head-up displays.

From the digital mockup (PGU output, mirrors, windshield or combiner), it provides optical metrics describing head-up displays optical system performance:

  • Virtual image distance, look down angle, look over angle, field of view
  • Distortion, smile, trapeze, torsion, magnification, rotation, divergence, etc.
  • Ghost
  • Field curvature, spot size, astigmatism
  • Fully automated, it performs a complete analysis with thousands of measurements for several configurations (driver size, mirror rotation) without any manual operations.

Additionally, HOA can create warping data to feed pre-distortion image correction. Warping information can also be imported. In both cases, optical metrics are calculated simulating the warping processing of the vehicle’s embedded software, reflecting the optical performance of the full HUD system.

Thanks to additional plugins supplementing HOA, analysis report can be customized with specific car manufacturer’s optical metrics definition and acceptance criteria.