Ceres Holographics Speeds Ahead in Growing HUD Market

Automotive

Ceres Holographics Speeds Ahead in Growing HUD Market

04 February 2025

Ceres Holographics has developed unique holographic thin-film technology to support transparent windshield displays in automobiles, has made significant recent progress in bringing its holographic optical element (HOE) technology to the mainstream automotive head-up display (HUD) market.

In December, Ceres signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with two key technology partners—Eastman and Covestro—to pursue commercial production of a holographic in-plane transparent display (HIPTD) laminated solution for windshields and side windows, which the three companies have jointly developed over the past few years. The HIPTD is based on Ceres’ expertise in programming and mastering highly precise holographic designs onto photopolymer film, which when combined with a light source render a high-resolution hologram within a driver’s eyebox. The same technology can be used to display holograms on side or rear passenger windows.

To create an optical function in the photopolymer film, Ceres uses a digital printer it developed in-house to program the film to be a high-precision diffuser, effectively creating a transparent projection screen within the windshield. Ceres uses its software to custom-design an HOE for each automotive model, working on a pixel-by-pixel basis to account for both the curve and rake of a particular windshield and the varying angles of light going to the film and then back to the driver’s eyeballs.

Germany-based Covestro makes the “Bayfol HX” film used in Ceres’ “HoloFlekt” holographic optical elements. Kingsport, Tennessee-based Eastman makes the plastic interlayer that is sandwiched between two sheets of glass in a laminated windshield and has devised a way to incorporate the Covestro film into it.

Last year, the three companies demonstrated their joint solution for holographic windshield HUDs to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in Europe, China, and the United States. Ford Motor Company has worked closely with the trio to implement a prototype in one of its vehicles and discussed that project in detail at the SID Vehicle Displays and Interfaces Symposium. Ceres, Covestro, and Eastman now are figuring out the necessary steps to create a supply chain capable of meeting automakers’ planned production timelines for HIPTD-equipped vehicles, including the required facilities and manufacturing capacity. Eastman has pledged to leverage its existing relationships with automotive OEMs and Tier-One suppliers to accelerate the adoption of the holographic HUD system.

The other key piece to the Ceres-driven HIPTD solution is a light source, such as a compact LED or laser projector mounted in the dashboard. On that note, in early January, Ceres announced an agreement with Chinese laser display specialist Appotronics to combine their technologies for in-car displays, including driver and passenger transparent HUDs. The two companies demonstrated a combined HUD system at CES 2025 in Las Vegas.

Appotronics invented its advanced laser phosphor display (ALPD) technology in 2007, which uses a blue laser diode in combination with a phosphor wheel to produce red, green and blue light. After successfully implementing ALPD in digital cinema projectors, the Shenzhen-based company has since branched into home theater, large venue, education, and AR applications. In recent years, Appotronics has shifted its focus to the automotive market, driven largely by the rapid growth of electric vehicles (EVs) in China.¹

In addition to the demonstration with Ceres at CES, Appotronics also showed an automotive-grade exterior laser projector that already has been incorporated into the Smart #5 electric SUV; an “all-in-one” laser smart headlight capable of meeting intelligent signal display (ISD), adaptive driving beam (ADB), and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) requirements; and several other prototype laser-driven displays for automotive. They included a distributed illumination and display system with a fiber-coupled light source, a high-performance laser beam scanning (LBS) display, a transparent surface display, and a finger-sized, ultra-compact DLP projector.

Supply Chain Progress

Since Ceres first showed its holographic HUD system at CES 2023, it has received fresh competition, most notably in the combination of leading Korean automotive parts supplier Hyundai Mobis and German optics specialist Zeiss. The two companies have joined forces to develop their own film-based holographic windshield display technology, which they demonstrated at CES 2025 inside a Kia EV9. Hyundai Mobis and Zeiss say they plan to complete pre-development on the windshield HUD product by mid-2026 and hope to bring it to market by 2027.

However, Ceres CEO Andy Travers said that Ceres is the only company that can copy holograms into a full-width film equal to the height of a windshield, including truck windshields. He says Ceres “is very comfortable” with the pace of its development and is working toward “a late 2026, 2027 release with a real customer.” In addition to Ford, which has been testing Ceres’ HIPDT solution for two years and has implemented it in a prototype Bronco, Ceres also is actively testing with OEMs in Europe and India.

“Right now, we have got fully laminated windshields running around in test vehicles at three OEMs at the moment,” said Travers. “So, we’re pretty happy with that progress.”

Those OEMs have moved beyond “simple concept testing,” explained Travers, and now are looking for price quotes from windshield companies, which then feed down to Eastman. While Ceres plays an essential early role in designing the entire HIPTD system for an OEM, it is not involved in those discussions because by that later stage it is essentially a subcomponent supplier.

“We kind of have a peculiar role in the sense that we step back from the procurement process, when the OEM really wants to step up and go to production,” said Travers. “But we’re right there at the forefront of it, because we’ve already done the system design with the OEM for their car.”

The MOU signed by Ceres, Eastman, and Covestro formalizes the business relationships between the companies as they ramp up production. Part of the MOU details how Eastman will supply the preferred substrate to Covestro, which will then coat it with the specified photopolymer before providing the film to Ceres. Ceres will then perform early-stage production of the HOEs using roll-to-roll replication machines at its Livingston, Scotland headquarters. It will then return the finished, programmed films back to Eastman for integration into the PVB (polyvinyl butyral) interlayer and eventual lamination into a windshield.

A look at the Ceres/Eastman/Covestro HIPTD solution.

The lamination process involves cooking the windshield at 130 degrees Celsius and under 8 BAR pressure to suck all the air out of the PVB. Eastman has developed proprietary chemistry to cover and protect that HOE film, including chemical interactions that go on between the cover film and the photopolymer. This has all been carefully designed by Eastman to ensure that shifts in the wavelength performance of the HOEs are within tolerated limits.

“It’s not like just covering something with a bit of plastic,” Travers explained. “Eastman and Ceres have had to work on what’s the effect of covering this top layer with an OCA, an optically clear adhesive, that actually interacts with the photopolymer. That is what we worked on for three to five years so that we understand what happens to the film once it’s put in its final assembly for lamination. Once we have calibrated exactly what happens, we go back and adjust the mastering process for offsets of wavelengths and angles so that the final shifts in wavelengths and angles after production is what is designed to go in the car. So, it’s an extremely complicated process.”

To support initial production volumes Ceres is building a second HOE replication machine at its Livingston headquarters, effectively doubling capacity. It then plans to build two more machines that will likely be delivered to Eastman facilities in Europe or the United States.

The base of the machines, which cost several million dollars each, are made by a specialist roll-to-roll machine builder in Germany. But Ceres builds the optics itself, which Travers described as “the significant high value piece.”

“You have to move the film and operate the lasers precisely so the master is copied correctly into the large piece of film,” he said.

Eventually Travers expects that Eastman will have a large number of the replication machines, which Ceres will simply license to them. The MOU also covers a “technology transfer project,” under which Ceres will teach Eastman personnel how to run a holographic film replication machine.

Projection Possibilities

To date, Ceres has primarily been working with small LED projectors that use Texas Instrument DLP chips. In its CES demonstration, it used Optima DLP projectors to display three different holograms on a windshield (one only viewable by the passenger). Ceres also has worked with some DLP laser projectors from Hisense.

Appotronics makes DLP-based projectors with its ALPD technology for a variety of applications, and at CES, the company demonstrated an ALPD projector working with a Ceres Holoflekt-enabled windshield. Travers said a big reason for the partnership with Appotronics is that Ceres is moving heavily into the Chinese market and is already in preliminary discussions with several Chinese OEMs. Appotronics is a well-respected supplier of automotive picture generation units (PGUs) in China.

“We’re not in a car yet, but we’ve got three tenders out now for projects to three Chinese OEMs, some of the big ones and some of the medium-sized ones,” said Travers. “And one of the things they’ve been saying is, can you use Appotronics?”

Travers said the precision of narrow-band laser DLP projectors can make them more efficient than LED for holographic applications. The lasers require thermoelectric coolers within the projectors to control their temperature and ensure they stay on the exact wavelength of the hologram.

“Appotronics does that cooling,” said Travers. “They tell us what the peak wavelength of the diode is going to be, 532 or 533 nm, and we go and record the hologram to be right smack-bang in the middle of that. And then you’ve got a matched, optimized system. That’s part of the value-add of knowing how to do the hologram design.”

Ceres also is interested in potentially using Appotronics’ LBS technology in combination with Holoflekt-enabled windshields. Travers said that the Appotronics LBS module, a single-mirror microelectromechanical system (MEMS), could be more power-efficient than DLP-based projectors as well as cheaper.

“We can drive down the cost, because that’s their own internal IP and we won’t have to be paying for that TI DLP chipset,” he said. “It’s no secret that the TI DLP chipset has always been a notoriously expensive set of components. The Appotronics deal is actually not excluding the use of DLP chipsets, but it is potentially pursuing another route with a single-mirror MEMS.”

Keeping the costs of the holographic HUDs down is a key priority for Ceres. Travers said that OEMs are looking for a total cost per display of $500 to $700 maximum, including the projector and the differential cost of the windshield with the holographic film in it. He thinks that is achievable, especially if the system can be made to work with lower-cost PGU technologies.

The Ceres-enabled windshield that Ford has integrated has passed all the necessary homologation tests required to implement it. But Travers will not hazard a guess as to when Ford or another OEM might roll out the transparent HUD in a production car. He said there are no remaining technical challenges left for OEMs, just business decisions.

“When a new technology appears, the first mover is always deemed to be taking a risk,” said Travers. “It’s about getting the group of those coincident first movers moving, and then it will be an avalanche. And I think that’s what Zeiss is betting on as well as us. There’s going to be enough business to go around for us all.”

Reference

1. Langley, W., & Li, G. (February 25, 2024). Chinese cinema projector maker says electric vehicles have box office potential. Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/f80467a2-c02a-4f9a-803a-ad173ee92fc2