It used to be that you drove your car to a movie theater to watch a movie.
Or you drove to a drive-in theater to watch a movie from your car.
But who wants that? Why stray more than a few feet from your car, or your driveway for that matter, to enjoy Great Movie Entertainment?
This must be what the Ford Motor Company was thinking when it applied for a patent for a vehicle that projects movies right out the back of it. In application #US20180304820A1 they claim:
“A vehicle, comprising:
a liftgate rotatable between a closed position and an open position; and
a video projector mounted to the liftgate, wherein the video projector is configured to project video in a direction away from the vehicle when the liftgate is in the open position.”
That last part, after the “wherein,” is so that people don’t go projecting movies onto the cars behind them. While driving. On the highway.
According to Ford, “In addition to being relied upon for transportation, automobiles are increasingly being used as entertainment accessories for tailgating, camping, and other outdoor activities. Further, vehicle infotainment systems have become robust, and are capable of interfacing with various mobile computing devices to allow users to consume various types of media within the vehicle, including music and video.”
Last March (2019) we posted on one of Ford’s other patent applications in the field of vehicles-as-entertainment-accessories with Ford’s “Portable entertainment support system for a pickup truck box.”
Will the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office deem this worthy of a patent, considering that patents tend to be granted for things that are useful as well as novel? We’ll let you know.
(Update, Feb 26, 2024: It was granted the following August.)
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