Marelli’s Passenger Display with Privacy Honored at the “Digital Engineering Awards 2024”

The Passenger Display with Privacy developed by Marelli has received the ‘Challenger’ honor at The Digital Engineering Awards 2024. Marelli’s technology was recognized in the “Engineering Product of the Year” category, during an award ceremony in Dallas, Texas. The Digital Engineering Awards – organized by L&T Technology Services in association with ISG (Information Services Group), and CNBC-TV18 – recognize and celebrate global engineering excellence and innovation.

Marelli’s Passenger Display with Privacy is an affordable first-to-market innovation for vehicle interiors that offers dynamic zonal privacy, to enhance safety and user experience. The technology allows passengers to conceal specific display zones when interacting with content, thus preventing driver distractions. It combines cutting-edge privacy software with a display panel using standard organic light-emitting diode (OLED) or thin-film transistor (TFT) technologies. This approach allows vehicle manufacturers to introduce - for the first time - high-quality, dynamic, and flexible electronics across a wide range of passenger displays.

The solution consists of two key components: the Display Panel and the Display Control Element. The Display Panel can utilize either OLEDs or TFTs, the latter of which relies on liquid crystal displays (LCDs). The Display Control Element is an active layer designed to modulate the panel’s light characteristics, narrowing the emission angle as needed.

These two components are combined, using software to dynamically adjust predefined viewing angles for drivers and passengers in either public or private mode. In public mode, the display is visible from a wide viewing angle, so that both driver and passenger can see the same content. In private mode, it is visible at a narrow viewing angle so that only the passenger sees the content. Users can activate either public or private mode in specific zones of the display panel, selecting specific content to be hidden from the driver, while previous solutions on the market offered limited privacy restricted to the entire display without zoning options.

The Privacy feature is available as an option both on Marelli’s EliteDisplay and ProDisplay hardware development platforms. EliteDisplay uses OLED as the light source and targets the luxury and premium vehicle market, making this high-end functionality affordable by utilizing standard OLED panels instead of custom ones. In this way, the solution makes dynamic privacy available for OLED panels for the first time. The mid-range ProDisplay platform uses TFT and is particularly attractive as it brings the benefits of privacy displays to an even broader range of vehicles.

"The Digital Engineering Award is a remarkable acknowledgment of our dedication to innovation in the automotive electronics domain," said Ravi Tallapragada, President of Marelli’s Electronic Systems business. "Our Passenger Display with Privacy represents a significant leap forward in ensuring an enriched and secure in-vehicle experience. It demonstrates our commitment to delivering state-of-the-art solutions that balance cutting-edge technology with user privacy. I am immensely proud of our talented teams whose relentless pursuit of excellence and collaboration with partners has made this achievement possible."

This is the second achievement for Marelli at the Digital Engineering Awards, that in the 2023 edition recognized the Fully Active Electromechanical Suspension with the ‘Commendable’ honor in the “Engineering Product of the Year” category.