汽车智能表面
What are smart surfaces / functional surfaces / shytech surfaces?
Smart surfaces—often also called functional surfaces or shytech surfaces—are seamlessly integrated interaction and display areas that remain visually minimalistic until activated. Unlike traditional interfaces with exposed buttons or fixed displays, smart surfaces embed illuminated symbols, multitouch areas, sliders, or gesture-responsive zones directly into the trim material of center consoles, dashboards, overhead panels or door modules.
Shytech elements remain hidden when inactive and become visible only through backside illumination, selective activation or proximity sensing. This enables freeform geometries, three-dimensional tactile guidance, and a clean, continuous material surface without visible cutouts.
Why are smart surfaces important?
As modern vehicles evolve toward a “smartphone on wheels,” interior interfaces must support:
- Higher functional density without overwhelming the driver
- OTA-updatable interaction concepts
- Clean, minimalistic design surfaces
- Flexible, free‑form shapes beyond flat display panels
- Reduced mechanical complexity, weight and cost
Physical buttons, knobs and rotary controls limit design freedom and cannot adapt to new functions after production. Smart surfaces solve this by enabling:
- Invisible-until-needed controls
- dynamic and reconfigurable interaction zones
- enhanced safety through tactile 3D shapes for “eyes-free” control
- uniform aesthetics across cockpit materials
- new lighting-based HMIs (highlighting, guiding, signaling)
Smart surfaces are rapidly becoming a key technology for next-generation human machine interfaces in automotive interiors.
At the same time, some aspects of physical buttons are often required for different applications, e.g. the capability to activate a button for a time-critical action via “activate by press” or find the button by its haptic properties alone (without needing to take the eyes off the road). Those features can also be addressed by suitable smart‑surface components, such as optical force sensing, which overcome the limitations of purely “touch‑only” interfaces that have contributed to non‑intuitive user experiences and unintended activations.
Technology overview
Smart surfaces combine light sources, sensors, actuators and thin optical structures beneath decorative materials such as plastic, fabric or composite panels.
Backside illumination with high-efficiency LEDs enables hidden-until-lit icons, uniform symbol lighting and dynamic animations. Light guides and thin diffusion layers distribute the light evenly across curved or freeform surfaces. Ultimately, individual addressable icons or displays can also be integrated into flexible surfaces and only appear when they are needed.
Touch and proximity sensing is implemented using optical sensors, IR emitters and detectors for hand detection or simple gestures, as well as capacitive, inductive or magnetic sensors for seamless buttons, sliders or integrated rotary controllers. To overcome the issue of unintended touch, force touch solutions can be implemented, e.g. with optical force sensing.
3D surface structures add tactile guidance, allowing controls to be located without looking away from the road, while dynamic lighting effects provide visual feedback, highlight active areas or support adaptive UX concepts. Haptic actuators allow fine-tuning of haptic experiences based on the sensor input to tailor the desired user experience.
ams OSRAM supports these functions with a broad portfolio of LEDs, IR devices, ambient light sensors and drivers optimized for surface-integrated HMIs.
Where can smart surfaces typically be found in a car?
Smart surfaces can be used in all areas where a human-machine interface is used. It can be applied in the central console area, often based on local microcontrollers that combine the different systems. It can also be found in the distributed areas around the car, such as the steering wheel, door panels or overhead consoles. Depending on where it is located, it can be addressed via a microcontroller or via a gateway from e.g. the Ethernet connection inside the vehicle. The latter is supported by the trend towards a more zonal or centralized E/E architecture in cars.
In addition to the well-known interior use cases in the passenger cabin, there are also smart surface use cases in the exterior of the car, e.g. for vehicle access (door, trunk, frunk) by hidden proximity or touch/force sensors. For those sensors, avoiding issues by diverse environments can be challenging.
What is the Open System Protocol (OSP) and how does it support smart surface architectures?
As ambient lighting and touch interfaces increasingly merge within the same surface areas, system architectures also move toward more unified, modular concepts.
ams OSRAM supports this trend within the Open System Protocol (OSP) ecosystem through components such as intelligent RGB modules, which simplify the implementation of addressable, dynamic lighting across smart surfaces. In addition, sensors, actuators or haptic feedback devices can be integrated using the Stand-Alone Intelligent Driver (SAID), enabling flexible and scalable interaction concepts. OSP shines in the area of remote smart surface applications, where no dedicated local microcontroller is present, and where the strength of the open system protocol as a cheap daisy-chain connected to the vehicle network e.g. via an T1-Base Ethernet gateway can be utilized, such as doors, dashboards or overhead consoles.
FAQ
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1. What is the difference between smart surfaces and shytech surfaces?
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Smart surfaces describe functional, sensor-integrated surfaces.
Shytech surfaces are a subset where functions remain invisible until illuminated or activated.
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2. How do smart surfaces improve safety?
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Smart surfaces reduce driver distraction by using tactile structures, proximity activation or shaped surface zones that can be operated without looking away from the road.
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3. Are smart surfaces replacing traditional buttons and switches?
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Not completely. They replace many mechanical controls, but tactile or rotary controls can still be integrated seamlessly using capacitive, inductive or magnetic sensing behind the surface.
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4. What sensing technologies are used in smart surfaces?
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Common options include:
- infrared emitters + detectors for proximity and gesture sensing
- capacitive or optical touch for flat buttons and sliders
- inductive/magnetic sensors for hidden rotary push buttons
- optical sensors for adaptive brightness or selective touch or force detection
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5. What can be done to combine an “activate by press” with smart surface?
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To avoid unintended touch, often an activate by press or similar features to confirm the intend of the user is requested. Force sensors, such as an optical force sensor can measure the force applied by the user and thus validate the intent for a single or potentially multiple buttons (if combined with other optical force sensors). In those cases, the sensitivity of the force sensor and the robustness to external interference is important for a smooth and reliable user experience. Optical force sensors can detect smallest deformations and are independent of external electrical fields or potentials and are therefore prime choices for reliable touch sensing.
Application block diagram
A general implementation of a human-machine-interface using discrete components and a local microcontroller can be seen in the following block diagram: