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CDA
February 27, 2023
General Motors (GM) is developing technology that allows touch screens to clean themselves.
Touch screens, like it or not, are very fashionable in cars and are rapidly replacing physical buttons. They are getting bigger and bigger They are increasingly present in the passenger compartments of cars.
This technological evolution has some things that do not end up convincing motorists, such as the lower precision of the same in front of the buttons and that they are easier to stain with our fingerprints and more difficult to clean.
To try to alleviate the latter, General Motors (GM) has patented a new design that allows touch screens erase fingerprints by themselves.
I’d wipe out the fingerprints we all leave
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And how will he do it? In addition to the red, green, and blue pixels, this new screen design would introduce an additional purple pixel which, similar to ultraviolet light, would be invisible to the human eye so as not to affect the colors and images seen on the screen.
The touch screen would also use a similarly invisible photocatalytic screen coating designed to absorb certain wavelengths of light in order to produce a chemical reaction.
GM’s patent suggests the use of a metal oxide-based photocatalyst that would react to ultraviolet radiation in sunlight, but since many cars use tinted windows to keep the interior dark and cool, the photocatalyst reaction would start with the violet pixels.
Ultifi, the connected software for future General Motors cars
At night, when the car is not being used in the dark, or even during a cleaning cycle manually initiated by the driver during the day, the purple pixels would light up and activate the photocatalyst in the display coating, which would start a chemical reaction that uses moisture in the air to break down organic materials left behind by fingerprintsas well as the remains of oil and fat from food that we have deposited on these surfaces from food remains.
When the reaction stops and everything dries, those grease stains and fingerprints are gone. For now, the technology is in the patent phase and GM has not announced whether it plans to use it in future cars..
