Feature Story

Beyond Touch: Uniphy Looks to Light Up the User Interface

Focusing initially on auto interiors, the U.K. startup aims to flip the script, conforming its optical technology to a myriad of surfaces.

What’s at stake?

Driver distraction only grows. New user interfaces that rely on touch and feel could help. Uniphy claims its optics-based approach for the auto interior empowers designers to build free-form interfaces that achieve the desired functionality without impinging on the vehicle aesthetics.

It seems like all things electronic are getting smart today: speakers, appliances, mirrors, even fabrics. The next-gen car is well on its way, too, and in case consumers aren’t catching on fast enough, automakers want them to know the car of the future is a “smartphone on wheels.”

But unlike the smartphone’s user interface, which was built around the rigid requirements of an LED display, next-gen car interiors will have smart skins. Drivers and passengers will interact with touch surfaces built into the dashboard, the doors and anywhere else automakers want to give riders control. Research and Markets pegs the overall smart-surface market at over $100 billion by 2026, with more than 40 companies working on technologies.

Building interfaces into the surfaces of products reduces component and assembly costs while adding reliability: A seamless interface doesn’t have entry points for moisture and dust, which can damage parts and shorten the life of a product.

And industrial designers win because smart surfaces liberate them from having to design around a rectangular user interface module. They can design free-form user interfaces directly into product surfaces, making control points conform to the product’s shape rather than the other way around.

Six-year-old Leeds U.K.-based Uniphy is banking on its “display agnostic” smart-surface technology to control everything from home appliances to a car’s climate, entertainment systems and powered seats, CEO Jim Nicholas told the Ojo-Yoshida Report. Uniphy’s Canvya technology can be used with glass or plastic, with surfaces created in any shape, he said. Ambient visuals can be designed in “as the surface itself becomes a screen.” 3D dials and buttons are shaped from the product’s surface.

Jim Nicholas CEO of startup Uniphy Uniphy CEO Jim Nicholas

Uniphy automotive concept renderings show a single plastic piece extending from the instrument panel of a vehicle down to the console, with various control sections embedded in the continuous piece for functions such as entertainment and climate control. Nicholas took it further with us, saying a car door panel can double as a control surface with buttons and sliders that control music or seat position, for instance. The surfaces also have pinch-to-zoom capability.

Uniphy’s smart surfaces can be smooth, where desired, or machined with textures, such as in a car setting. Nicholas described grooves integrated into a car smart surface with tactile 3D protrusions and divots; those textures, together with haptic feedback, allow drivers to control functions by feel while keeping their eyes on the road.

Hyundai’s Motor European Technical Center is working with Uniphy on smart human-machine interfaces (HMIs) “to revolutionize the driver and passenger experience,” the partners said in March. The technology combines non-conductive, finger-pressure touch sensing with physical HMI features including dials, buttons and sliders. The solution integrates haptic feedback, touch-gesture and proximity recognition and can integrate with popular voice control engines, the companies said.

Citing automotive’s three- to five-year typical time to volume, Nicholas envisions achieving production yield volumes with Hyundai in 2025–2026. But the “EV disruption” could work in Uniphy’s favor, potentially shortening the turnaround time to as little as 1.5 years, he said.

Also in March, Uniphy announced a collaboration with car interior company Grupo Antolin. The two are working on in-car user interfaces using “touch contours” such as longitudinal or circular sliders and concave/convex touch-surface dials, plus touch/gesture and proximity recognition integrated with displays and lighting solutions.

“In automotive, if you don’t have a cost argument, forget it.”
Jim Nicholas

Uniphy started with the automotive industry because car companies “have more appetite to engage” with a company at Uniphy’s stage of development, Nicholas said. The automotive industry also tends to showcase “megatrends,” making it a good platform from which to get a view of the competitive landscape, he said.

The company has more than cars in mind for its free-form 3D smart surfaces. It’s “on the verge” of working on customer proof-of-concept designs with several appliance makers and could go to volume production with one or more of them in the second half of 2023, Nicholas said. Appliance integration offers a way to validate the company’s “cost argument” and the manufacturing processes it leverages, he said. The CEO expects partnership announcements later this year.

Uniphy’s major competition is in-mold electronics technology, which uses injection-molded plastics embedded with conductive films, sensors, actuators and other components — what Nicholas calls “electric-field–based technology.”

Dupont, for one, describes its in-mold electronics technology as creating “intelligent surfaces,” with capacitive switches printed directly on a device surface, integrating electrical connections, capacitive switches, curved touch surfaces, sensors, LEDs and screens. Dupont says that by eliminating buttons, sliders and wires used by a traditional interface, overhead console designs can be 3mm thick versus 25mm, slash the mechanical parts count from 64 to two, weigh 77% less and use 25% less space.

In contrast, Uniphy’s technology is optics-based: When a finger contacts the touch layer, light scatters, reflecting or refracting. The technology, which can be as thin as “several millimeters,” has no “stuff” in the active area, Nicholas said.

Uniphy_Canvya | The Ojo-Yoshida Report Uniphy’s patented technology uses light sensing and low power electronics for optical touch, reducing false triggering, susceptibility to vibration, electromagnetic fields, extreme temperatures or surface contaminants. (Source: Uniphy)

The Canvya smart-surface technology uses a three-layer laminate with touch and detection layers sandwiching an optical decoupler. The touch layer has light-emitting diodes that generate light with a frequency of near-infrared, the CEO said. When the smart surface is touched, some of the light is directed through the detection layer and picked up by photodiode sensors. Algorithms calculate other input data such as speed, gestures and pressure.

Gloves on

A top differentiator of the optical technology is its ability to work with gloves, unlike a smartphone’s capacitive touchscreen display, which can’t register a gloved-finger press. That makes Uniphy’s smart surface technology useful for industrial and medical applications where specialized gloves are required, along with cold-weather use in a vehicle.

Nicholas maintains his company’s solution is cost-effective for manufacturers because “we’re just using standard materials and mainstream manufacturing processes.” For a 20% cost add, a door becomes a premium feature, “an incremental cost of going from decorative trim to functional trim,” he said.

Too often, a car interior has a “mismatch” of different HMI interfaces, Nicholas said. Uniphy’s tech can be the “DNA of the art form” for a carmaker’s signature look. A door panel moves from being a single-function decorative element “to being decorative and functional,” he said.

“In automotive, if you don’t have a cost argument, forget it.”

Bottom line

Auto dashboards and consoles are getting crowded with infotainment interfaces that vie for drivers’ attention, and manipulating these controls adds to driver distraction. In targeting the automotive HMI, Uniphy sees an opportunity to prove and perhaps scale its optical interface approach with auto interior and appliance specialists.

Return to: 2022 Feature Stories