Luminit: A Glass Act

With the accelerating shift away from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles, the drivetrain has largely become a commoditized component. This reduces brand differentiation through propulsion system performance, and removes drivetrain engineering as unique selling point.

As a consequence, we should expect to see new innovations in cabin-design, as the new competitive landscape in consumer automotive… and Luminit’s display tech is the brand differentiator that automotive companies are looking for.

At the core of Luminit’s display is a transparent holographic optical element (HOE)—a precision-engineered layer embedded within the windshield glass. This isn’t a screen or a piece of film in the cinematic sense. It’s a thin, solid-state optical component, created using a laser-based process that encodes microscopic structures into a photopolymer substrate. These structures act like tiny diffraction gratings, carefully designed to redirect laser light into the viewer’s line of sight.

When the system’s laser projector shines light from a precisely aligned position, the HOE reconstructs a bright, high-resolution image that appears to float in space outside the windshield, creating an in-air image using light-bending optics alone—no moving parts, and no visible screen.

How does this visual system differ from optics used in smart glasses?
How is it similar?

The optics within smart glasses typically create two different images—one for the left eye, and one for the right. Human binocular vision allows us to perceive our environment with spatial awareness, and smart glasses leverage this. But Luminit’s automotive displays do not have separate imagery sent to each eye, rather, the optical system’s eye-box is large enough to accommodate both eyes at once. The advantage is that the viewer can see the imagery without wearing glasses or any special hardware at all (except of course the automobile itself).

As for similarities, it bears some resemblance to an oversized LBS, through-the-air projection system, like that once found in Focals by North… if their lens was the size of your windshield.

In the near term, Luminit’s HUD offers existing automotive UI—instrument clusters, alerts, ecosystem integration—in a less cluttered, and safer heads-up user experience (not to mention, gorgeous execution).

Design by Distraction: How Automakers Lost Touch

Over the past decade, touchscreen surfaces have come to dominate automobile cabin driver input, and feedback. Driven by the novelty of touchscreen surfaces in popular devices like smartphones and tablets, but also by the comparative low cost of these interfaces compared to more traditional automotive dashboards.

There has also been a rising chorus of dissatisfaction from across a wide spectrum—from standards organizations, to automotive designers, and especially from drivers themselves.

In recent guidance, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has stated:
“The use of devices that require a driver to divert attention from the driving task should be minimized. Tasks should be simple and require minimal manual and visual input.” The European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP) has been even more direct, “Physical controls that allow operation without removing the eyes from the road remain preferable… over interfaces that require navigation through touchscreens.”

“Why have buttons and switches cluttering up the dashboard when you could have just one touchscreen with all the functions? The simple answer is that buttons are always where you remember them to be, and can easily be used without taking your eyes off the road.” Wrote Matt Crisara, for Popular Mechanics. The truth is, while sold as a technology forward feature, the over reliance on touchscreens by automakers has been heavily driven by cost savings, as Jay Caspian Kang writes in the New York Times, “I can think of no better way of describing the frustration of the modern consumer than buying a car with a feature that makes you less safe, doesn’t improve your driving experience in any meaningful way, saves the manufacturer money and gets sold to you as some necessary advance in connectivity.”

In one of the few criticisms in an otherwise positive critique of the Tesla Model 3, writing for Wallpaper, Jonathan Bell notes, “The interior strips back everything to that big central screen, which sits atop the dash…” and makes the case for an automotive HUD. While the touchscreen, “[places] information out of your immediate line of sight…” he suggests, “a heads-up display would be a welcome addition”.

The Case for an Automotive HUD: Safety First

HUDs project critical data—speed, navigation, and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) Alerts—directly onto the windshield in the driver’s line of sight, minimizing the need to look away. Luminit’s technology ensures sharp, bright, and full-color images with over 90% transparency, countering concerns about visibility obstruction or dim displays in varied lighting conditions. By integrating augmented reality (AR) capabilities, these HUDs also streamline information delivery, reducing the cognitive load of navigating multiple controls, thus offering a safer, more intuitive alternative to traditional cabin interfaces.

Forward Looking: Screenplay

As self-driving cars finally deliver on their promise, drivers become passengers, the cabin will become a theater, a classroom, and a living room, a game room, and an office. The user experience operating these onboard media systems will move to the fore, in competitive differentiation.

Luminit has also developed glass with pixel-level dimming technology. Although the details have not been disclosed, Waldern’s prior experience developing switchable Bragg gratings for active holographic waveguides during his time at DigiLens may give a hint. The active property that make those waveguides “switchable” is based on an electroactive liquid crystal based polymer. This leads me to believe that Luminit’s dimming is likely something in the same technological family as the pixel-level dimming technology employed by FlexEnable.

Roll-to-Roll: Printing at Scale

Luminit’s newest manufacturing plant, dedicated to the production of Holographic Optically Illuminated Displays, is opening this coming November, joining their Torrance, CA manufacturing complex, with existing production lines for Holographic, “Surface Relief” type Roll to Roll production line, featuring new and more advanced “Volume Bragg Grating” type nano-optical capability.

Luminit is betting big. Their new factory allows them to scale with U.S. based production, strengthening the domestic supply chain. They’ve also expanded their R&D facilities for greater opportunity for brand collaborations (and they are hiring).

Roll-to-roll processing is a high-efficiency manufacturing technique where a continuous, flexible material (like a plastic film) is fed from one roll, processed, and wound onto another. In the context of Luminit’s holographic replication, R2R involves imprinting holographic optical elements (HOEs) onto thin films, enabling mass production of precise optical components at lower cost.

Last year I had the opportunity to demo Luminit’s automotive HUD. It is not just a superior user experience—it is stunning. If you are in the automotive industry, it is worth your time to see their demo for yourself. After experiencing Luminit’s HUD, dashboard touchscreens will look and feel dated.

Vision–Product Symbiosis

CEO Jonathan Waldern came to Luminit with a background spanning Virtual Reality gaming systems, and HUD designs for private jets. Applying his unique experience to Luminit, themselves already an established player in automotive, with beam shaping headlights & tail lights, are best positioned to create and grow this new market.