Today I had a very interesting discussion at the CES in Las Vegas about the need for bandwidth of ambient light applications in cars.
My discussion partner and I agreed that many engineers lack phantasy, what nice applications could be realized when more data bandwidth would be available to have a more fine granular projection of light.
Have a look at the video to stimulate your imagination of ambient light.
The Sphere
- Hight: 112 m
- Diameter: 157 m
- Number of Pixels: 1.2 Mio
If we now assume that each pixel has a resolution of 2 Bytes which means that it can have 2 Power of 16 different colors and a refresh rate of 60 Hz, we get a data stream 1.200.000 x 2 x 60 Bytes per second.
That is a data stream of 137 MB/s that is needed to project the images to the surface of the Sphere.
Of course we will not see 1.2 Mio LEDs in cars. But this example shows, why the ambient lighting experts push for using Automotive Ethernet instead of CAN for ambient lighting.
The Automotive Ethernet Blog 