SEOUL, June 29 (AJP) - Hyundai Motor and Kia won a bronze award at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity for a campaign using vehicle safety technology to protect children near school buses, the companies said Sunday.
The campaign, titled "Vision Pulse," received bronze in the Design: Use of Emerging Technology category.
Cannes Lions, held annually in Cannes, France, is one of the world's leading advertising and creative industry festivals. This year's event drew more than 20,000 entries from 92 countries, according to Hyundai and Kia.
The campaign showed how Hyundai and Kia applied ultra-wideband, shortened as UWB, technology to kindergarten shuttle buses to help drivers detect children and other road users nearby.
UWB uses radio signals to identify the location of nearby objects in real time. In the Vision Pulse system, a vehicle's UWB module communicates with small UWB tags carried by children, pedestrians, cyclists or other road users. If the system detects a possible collision risk, it warns the driver.
Hyundai and Kia said the technology causes little interference with other radio signals and can identify objects within about 10 centimeters at a range of roughly 100 meters, even in crowded urban intersections with many obstacles.
For the campaign, the companies designed child-friendly UWB tags as key rings that can be attached to school bags. The tags also function as night lights, encouraging children to charge them before going to bed.
The campaign video presented the technology as a way to reduce blind spots around school buses and improve safety for young children.
According to Hyundai and Kia, the Cannes Lions jury recognized the campaign for using emerging technology to address a real safety problem and for connecting the system with the companies' existing digital key technology.
The Vision Pulse campaign had previously won awards at The One Show and Spikes Asia earlier this year.
Hyundai and Kia are also testing the technology in industrial settings. Since 2025, the companies have applied Vision Pulse to production lines at Kia's purpose-built vehicle conversion center in Hwaseong, south of Seoul, to help prevent collisions between forklifts and workers.
Hyundai also signed an agreement with the Busan Port Authority last October to test the technology at Busan Port terminals and logistics sites.
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