The £1.65 million ($2.1 million / €1.9 million) Batur was unveiled in 2022 as the most powerful Bentley ever created. The company continues to unveil its secrets, and today it's revealing the car's distinctive light sculpture.
Essentially a high-tech welcome animation, the light sculpture is projected onto the ground when the doors are opened. While a number of models project images or logos onto the floor, the animations set the Batur apart:
To add them to the car, a new projection system had to be developed. As Bentley explained, the system uses “three colored light sources projecting through five different lens and two prisms into a highly advanced 8mm2 digital micromirror device. The light signal is then focused through five further lenses, displaying the animation on the ground when the doors open.”
The company went on to explain that the digital micromirror device is a small silicon chip containing 415,800 mirrors made of aluminium and measuring just 16 microns in width. That's about one-fifth the width of a human hair.
Although the mirrors are tiny, their movement makes it possible to create a moving image. As Bentley noted, because the mirror and hinge are so small, “they can react thousands of times per second with each mirror delivering one pixel in the animation.”
Bentley’s Animated Light Sculpture
Light hits these mirrors and is either reflected back into the projector or onto the floor. The idea is a bit like turning individual pixels on and off. Bentley also noted that the car is the first to use Digital Light Processing technology to greet passengers, as it's largely been relegated to adaptive headlights and head-up displays.
While the Batur is limited to 18 units, lighting animations could be used on future models. As Bentley teased, they've spent the last 100 years focusing on leather, metal and wood, but they now see light as the next "material" that will "play a significant part" in their design language.
Source: Bentley
