Today the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office officially granted Apple a couple of Project Titan patents relating to a sophisticated in-vehicle lighting system and traffic notifications system for iDevices and in-vehicle dashboard navigation systems.

In-Vehicle Lighting Systems

In some ways, the granted patent titled "Lighting system for vehicle interior" relates to smart fabrics in combination with a lighting system that may be integrated into a fabric seat, door panel, dashboard, or other interior portions of a system such as a vehicle.

Further, the illumination from a lighting system may provide ambient light, may create a custom surface texture or other decorative pattern on a seat or other interior surface, may include icons, text, and other information, and may include custom gauges.

Illuminated regions may overlap sensors such as capacitive touch sensors, force sensors, and other sensors. The light-emitting diodes in a lighting system may supply light that passes through openings in a cover layer. The layer may be formed from fabric, leather, or other materials. Lens structures may guide light through the openings.

Apple's patent FIG. 1 below illustrates system #10 that covers the basics in a vehicle including the dashboard, seats, headrests, safety belts and so forth while including a new illumination lighting system. A camera (#26) may monitor movements of the vehicle's occupants. The vehicle's seats (#22) may include pressure sensors (#31) to measure pressure (weight) due to the presence of a driver, passenger, or other occupants (users) in the seats.

Apple's patent FIG. 2 below is a schematic diagram of an illustrative system with lighting; FIG. 5 is a side view of an illustrative light projection system such as an image projector of the type that may be used to provide lighting.

Apple's patent FIG. 23 above is a perspective view of an illustrative magnetic holder for an item such as a cup and an associated lighting system.

When driving at night, most of the time trying to put a cup of coffee back in its proper place is a hit and miss experience. with a next-gen lighting system, as I go to place my coffee down, a landing site for my mug will light up. It sounds like a very cool idea for night driving.

Apple's patent FIG. 11 below is a cross-sectional side view of an illustrative lighting system with a force sensor layer; FIGS. 14, 15, 16, and 17 are diagrams showing illustrative patterns of illumination that may be produced with a lighting system.

Apple's patent FIG. 20 above is a perspective view of an illustrative illuminated wireless charging pad.

Once again, the wireless recharger's landing pad will light up at night to guide you to where you need to put your iPhone down so that you're not fumbling around in the dark trying to find it and distract you while driving.  For night driving it could come in handy while being cool.  

For more details, review Apple's granted patent 11,097,658.

Traffic Notifications during Navigation

The second Project Titan patent is titled "Traffic notifications during navigation." Apple notes that with proliferation of mobile devices such as smartphones, users are enjoying numerous applications of numerous kinds that can be run on their devices. One popular type of such application is mapping and navigation applications that allow user to browse maps and get route directions. Despite their popularity, these mapping and navigation applications have shortcomings with their features that cause inconvenience to the users.

Apple's invention and now granted patent provides a navigation application that uses a novel traffic notification scheme for providing traffic related notifications during a navigation presentation that is provided by a device. During a navigation presentation, the application provides navigation instructions that specify navigation maneuvers at junctures along a route that the device traverses to a destination.

Apple's patent FIG. 1 below illustrates one example of such a dynamically presented traffic notification banner. In this example, the navigation application displays a traffic notification banner (#105) above a navigation banner (#110) that is displayed above or over a navigation presentation (#100). In some embodiments, the navigation application executes on a handheld device (e.g., smartphone, tablet, etc.), or other computing device (e.g., laptop computer, vehicle navigation system, vehicle information display system, etc.) that has a display screen (#150) on which application presents the navigation presentation.

In other embodiments, the display screen is part of another device (e.g., a vehicle's information display system) that is being driven by the handheld device or other computing device that executes the navigation application.

FIG. 7 conceptually illustrates a traffic notification process.

For more details, review granted patent 11,100,797.