Forget LED headlamps – according the BMW, the next logical step in car lighting development is laser lights. Laser lighting is radically different from sunlight or any different kind of artificial lighting used today, including the different types of light sources we use in vehicle headlamps.

Laser lighting is monochromatic, which means that all the light waves have the same length. It is also a “coherent” light source, which means its waves have a constant phase difference. As a result, laser lighting can produce a near-parallel beam with an intensity a thousand times greater than that of conventional LEDs, while having less than half the energy consumption of LED headlamps.

The intensity of laser light poses no possible risks to humans, animals or wildlife when used in car lighting. Amongst other things, this is because the light is not emitted directly, but is first converted into a form that is suitable for use in road traffic. The resulting light is very bright and white.

Check out the videos in this post for some demos that I managed to record while attending the BMW Innovation Days in Munich. You can see how the thin blue laser beam is converted into a bright white light.

The movies Minority Report and Iron Man opened our imaginations to a world where we can give commands and manipulate content on screens just by moving our limbs. And then came game console technology like Nintendo’s Wii and Microsoft’s Kinect, bringing advanced gesture recognition to the living room.

BMW has been experimenting with ways to bring gesture control to the automobile. The use of gesture recognition in the car is subject to various restrictions, since it has to take into account a number of requirements which are less important in the field of home entertainment or smartphones.

In the vehicle environment, gestures must be short, concise and unambiguous. Performing them must not cause more than brief distraction and must not negatively impact the driving task in any way.

For now, BMW is only using gestures to control very specific functions of the iDrive display. Basically they found that operating the entire iDrive system via gestures is impractical with the current level of technologies. It is currently in no way intended as a substitute for the iDrive controller knob. Instead, BMW is using simple gestures to control the split screen feature of the iDrive screen.

You can watch the video above to view the prototype gesture system in action. A sensor mounted on the rear view mirror captures your hand movement – move to the left or right to switch the split screen on or off, or move up and down to scroll between the different content that the split screen can display. You can also move your hand towards the screen to go back to the main menu.

BMW’s gesture research work continues to further fine tune it to rule out the risk of incorrect inputs, so that typical hand movements to the gesture area to do things such as operate the gear selector are not misinterpreted as a command geature.

Look at the image above – click it for a larger image to help you get a clearer view. Did you notice the pedestrian standing in front of the car in the top half of the image? Now look at the bottom half of the image – the pedestrian is now clearly highlighted.

According to statistics, pedestrians are as much as four times more likely to be injured or killed in a traffic accident at night compared to in the daylight. Add to the fact that there are just so many roads here in Malaysia that are not really very well lit, and the probability goes up even higher.

At the recent BMW Innovation Days in Munich, BMW demonstrated to members of the media their new Dynamic Light Spot technology, which helps highlight pedestrians (or even animals – apparently all cats are grey at night?) in dark areas so that drivers are more aware of them, thus helping reduce the likelihood of an accident.

Before this, BMW had the Night Vision feature, which in Malaysia is present on some cars such as the more expensive 7-Series models. It helps the driver identify pedestrians in the dark by highlighting them on the iDrive screen using a thermal imaging camera.

Conventional low-beam light allows drivers a theoretical range of vision of about 50 to 85 metres at night, and tests have shown the recognisability of a darkly clad pedestrian in twilight was found to be just 29 metres. BMW Night Vision can increase this positive recognition of pedestrians up to 97 metres on average.

However, using the feature can be a little distracting as the thermal image appears on the iDrive screen and sometimes you not be paying enough attention, or perhaps you’ve just forgotten to turn the feature on.

The new Dynamic Light Spot feature takes this concept one level further – it uses a thermal imaging camera to sense a pedestrian, but instead of just highlighting them on the iDrive screen, a marker light using a sweveling LED array comes on to illuminate the target clearly for the driver to spot them.

It’s not just a bright light pointed at a person or animal – there is also a thin but defined strip of light projected onto the road in the path leading up to the object in danger, which helps draw the driver’s attention even more. According to BMW, during the development phase of this new feature, one object was detected and highlighted every hour on average.

Check out the video above to view a demo of BMW Dynamic Light Spot in action. For demo purposes, a BMW 5-Series GT was used and the swiveling LED array was retrofitted in a small housing where the fog lamps used to be.