By Jay Peters , a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.
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Sony and Honda’s in-development Afeela EV will let you display messages and images on its front bumper, according to a new video about the car, including the ability to... advertise video games.
You can see the screen-ified bumper — sorry, the “Media Bar” — starting at 3:17 in the video. The video does show some more sensible uses of the Media Bar, like displaying the name of the car, a red warning sign, or even a birthday greeting. But the video also shows how you can display logos for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Fortnite, and Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition, which is just ridiculous.
That’s not the only weird — and potentially distracting and dangerous — tech thing packed into the screen-filled car. One feature, “Monster View,” overlays virtual kaiju monsters on the parts of the road you can see on your dashboard screen and encourages the driver to “catch the monsters that have escaped.” It seems like a bad idea to encourage people to chase virtual beasts that only they can see while navigating busy city streets. You can also apparently watch movies on the giant screen on the dashboard of the car, which seems like an even worse idea!
You should watch the full video for yourself to get an idea of what Sony and Honda are thinking for the Afeela. (There are a couple other new videos about the car, too.) That said, I should note that the Afeela is described as a “prototype” in the YouTube description, so anything in the video could change before this car comes to market, which Sony and Honda said last year would happen in North America in 2026.
At least we’ll eventually be able to try the Afeela in Gran Turismo 7.
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