When you buy an ultra-luxury vehicle these days, you can configure just about everything to your liking. Want the paint to match the color of the dress your now-wife was wearing when you two went on your first date? Rolls-Royce Bespoke can make that happen—for a price. Must you absolutely have leather HVAC vent surrounds and slats in your 911 Turbo S? Leave it—and $1,620—to Porsche’s Exclusive Manufaktur division. Now, the high-tech artisans in Bentley’s Mulliner coachbuilding workshop are offering clients custom animated welcome lamps.
“Bentley has crafted in wood, leather and metal for over 100 years, and now through the art of digital craftsmanship, light becomes the next medium—bridging the gap between handcrafted luxury and digital animation.” This isn’t the first time Bentley Mulliner has offered what it calls “digital light processing”—it introduced the flashy tech on the 18-unit production run of Batur grand touring coupes. The newest version of the feature allows buyers to personalize the design and animation of the welcome (aka puddle) lights. It starts with an introduction sequence that lasts as long as 11 seconds when the door is opened, then continues with a looped animation that’s projected continuously. The client can even incorporate other parts of their Bentley into the show, such as animated personalized embroidery.
According to Bentley, “The projection system that makes this all possible uses three coloured light sources projecting through five different lens and two prisms into a highly advanced 8mm² Digital Micromirror Device (DMDTM).” The DMD is a silicone chip that consists of 415,800 tiny aluminum mirrors that can be adjusted thousands of times per second to produce a moving image, which appears once the illumination from the colored light sources passes through the previous lenses and hits the mirrors in their “on” position. Mirrors that are “off” reflect light into a heat sink that absorbs it. Whatever light leaves the DMD is transmitted through an additional five lenses, then hits the ground below when a door is opened.
You can see an example of the Bentley Mulliner animated welcome lighting in the video below. Inspired by the headrest embroidery and the dashboard’s musical motif, the projection shows waves of music notes floating in front of the Romanian Athenaeum Concert Hall in Bucharest.
