An open platform provides quick and cost-effective integration of the latest in-vehicle infotainment capabilities, allowing scalability for upgrades and dynamic flexibility as new consumer electronic products come to market.
For an automaker, the car is a way to transport people safely and comfortably from point A to point B. For the consumer, that's only part of the story. The car may also be a place to do business, find friends, access real-time road and destination information, watch movies, download videos, send voice-controlled instant messages or listen to e-mail. In short, a consumer would love to extend his or her digital lifestyle into their vehicle. Is this possible? Can the industry create a fundamental shift in its business strategy that will keep pace with this rapidly changing consumer vision of the automobile? Absolutely.
Consumers are expecting it and now the technology is here. The challenge before us is putting all the pieces together. Consumer expectations began shifting when computing and media went mobile. The iPod provided the ultimate in mobile media; suddenly you could carry over 100 hours of video and over 20,000 songs in your pocket. This kind of media mobility has created an end-user expectation of a digital lifestyle that extends just about anywhere. Wi-Fi and the emerging deployment of WiMAX, combined with existing 2.5G and 3G deployments, create pervasive connectivity for computing and media consumption on-the-go. State-of-the-art small form factor devices such as MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices) are always connected to the Internet, providing round-the-clock connection to media. We can only expect that consumers will wish to have those capabilities in their cars, integrated in a safer and user-friendly environment.
In-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems are evolving rapidly. For example, a fully connected MID that includes your business and personal schedules, meshed with your IVI system, is a recipe for increased productivity. Using text-to-speech synthesis software, you could verbally command your system to connect to your company's communication server so that you can listen and respond to voicemail and e-mail messages. Vehicles will even communicate with other vehicles, sharing information on highway alerts and emergency systems, to provide a safer journey. State-of-the-art navigation systems integrate real-time traffic data, your personal points of interests and buddy locations into a new experience, even extending the car into the Web 2.0 era of social networking. While some of these systems may be released in a few years from now, car OEMs and service providers can easily rattle off fifty innovative new applications, services and capabilities they would like to enable on IVI systems to bring greater efficiency and productivity to both drivers and passengers.
Media, navigation, point-of-interest services and real-time communications are converging on the head unit-opinions on how this head unit will evolve, however, are varied. One camp asserts that personal devices should dock into the car, becoming the interface for the vehicle as well as the source of media and connectivity capabilities. The other camp believes that MIDs are content carriers that must seamlessly connect within the car. To ensure ease-of-use and brand equity of the car manufacturer and to deal with the endless stream of legislation regarding what you can and cannot do in a car, attach to the windshield, or bring into the car-this group also believes the main source of infotainment and the human interface must be built-in.
Only time can tell how these differing views are going to play out. The most likely outcome is the co-existence of these two use models with some variance based on car model and targeted consumer demographic. Given this dynamic, it is important that we establish an open, flexible platform with architectural consistency between mobile devices and the head unit, so that applications are easily portable between those two platforms. An open platform architecture will enable the industry to sort through the complexity of what will be mobile and what will be integrated, how these two platforms will interact with each other, and how automobile manufacturers will keep pace with these changes in the consumer electronics world.
Primary considerations for building any new platform are connectivity, multimedia, time-to-market and total cost-of-ownership.
A critical factor with connectivity is bringing Internet capability into the car as transparently as possible, to provide the consumer with uncompromised access to web-based applications, data and media. Because the Internet is evolving so rapidly, the underlying platform architecture must keep up with ever-evolving Internet standards, protocols, website implementations and data representation. Like it or not, Internet technologies and standards are first made available on the web browsers and the standard PC platform. As other platforms follow, the time lag can be as severe as two years or more. If an IVI platform is to keep pace with trends in the consumer marketplace and take advantage of the latest Internet capabilities, it must use an implementation that offers those capabilities early and broadly.
The younger generation is hooked to streaming video-watching You- Tube while instantly messaging their friends about what they're watching. This requires high-bandwidth pipes. In addition, mid-to high end infotainment solutions often provide multiple displays and 3D navigation, streaming to different passengers in parallel. Imagine a learning application that tells your kids in the backseat about the history of places you drive by. This requires real-time integration of location data, video and graphics. Make it interactive and you can imagine the scalability demands put on an IVI system. To handle these demands, our next-generation infotainment platforms must balance power consumption, connectivity, graphics capabilities and performance with the thermal and hardening requirements of vehicles. To do it right, we need an approach that is quite different from how IVI systems were architected and implemented in the past.
A brand new car coming off the lot will most likely have a sound, connectivity and navigation system that is easily three to four years behind what can be purchased off-the-shelf, today, as a mobile consumer solution. Consequently, next-generation IVI solutions must be more open with the goal of shortening time-to-market and supporting integration of newly released consumer applications. Furthermore, a platform that is less dependent on hardware-specific implementations and takes advantage of the flexibility of software can be up graded more easily as new applications are released. This demands a shift from hardware to software engineering, and a repartitioning of the platform architecture. We need to build scalable solutions with enough headroom to add new applications before a car leaves the plant, or to upgrade a vehicle purchased a year or two ago.
The engineering challenges of any IVI system are intriguing, and many of us love to tinker with those systems. But we must also deal with budgets and look carefully at how we allocate resources. Vertically integrated systems are inherently poor at leveraging common engineering investments across the industry. In the field of IVI, many vendors are spending enormous resources to develop exactly the same basic, undifferentiated features. Use of an open platform would not only support more "re-use" at the basic OS, driver and middleware levels, but also significantly reduce the cost of validation. Many companies spend 30-40 per cent of total production cost on test, integration and validation- a significant part of the overall development cost of a platform. Shifting to an open platform allows companies to reallocate engineering resources towards greater value-added and highly differentiated engineering tasks such as implementing new services, solutions and applications.
Media, consumer devices, connectivity and the automotive industry are quickly converging. Use of a flexible and open standards based platform will speed development and deployment, and reduce the cost of engineering and validation so that more resources can be directed to the creation of new applications and services. Intel, along with its well-developed ecosystem of hardware and software suppliers, will continue to deliver platforms, applications and capabilities that enhance safety as well as enjoyment and productivity. A rich and open platform will empower the industry to keep pace with new consumer electronic devices and Internet technology, allowing customers to take their digital lifestyles with them, wherever they go.
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Ton Steenman is the president, Digital Enterprise Group and General Manager of the Low-Power Embedded Products Division (LEPD), at Intel. Prior to his current assignment, he was the general manager of the Modular Communications Platform Division (MCPD) at Intel Corporation. During his 25 years at Intel, he has held a variety of General Management, Product Management, Marketing and Sales positions.
