EB Automotive Software Newsletter -
Issue 01/2010
January 22, 2010
Dear Subscriber,
Welcome to the CES special edition of the EB Automotive Software Newsletter.
Like pumpkins and Halloween, the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is a uniquely American tradition. Early in January, when most of Europe is still on vacation, every gadget imaginable vies for the public's attention at this event that, like Las Vegas, is a bit over the top.
At EB we pride ourselves on transforming technology into rich and unique end user experiences. Being responsible for EB's Automotive US operations it's been my pleasure seeing the impact of EB's solutions amidst all those exciting gadgets at the CES!
Here are two of my favorite examples of EB enabled software platforms making a difference at this year's CES:
Ford Motor Company announced an application programming interface (API) for its in-car infotainment system Ford SYNC that enables smartphone applications to easily integrate with the vehicle. To test the API's value for the developer community, a SYNC developer tool kit was made available and Ford approached students from the University of Michigan asking them to develop apps that would be most relevant to access through SYNC while in the car. Within just a few weeks the students learned to use this API to fully integrate Pandora Internet Radio, Twitter and Stitcher with the vehicle, steering wheel buttons, radio control buttons, voice control, and all. For the past two years EB has been working very closely with Ford on various iterations of SYNC and resulting in this exciting new API.
With this new API for Ford SYNC and the apps resulting from it, drivers will be able to use the applications they love on their infotainment systems, similar to how iPhone users populate their phones with their favorite applications. In my opinion, it's the power of automotive software architecture, bringing intuitive in-car applications alive.
NVIDIA and AUDI presented the latest version of the AUDI A8 User Interface including 3D graphics acceleration and an advanced touchpad with gesture recognition. Everyone I spoke with loved the interface showing that Automotive User Interfaces clearly can wow the consumer.
Does this mean that the car is the ultimate consumer device? Maybe looking for automotive trends at the CES makes sense after all. See you next year in Las Vegas!
Sincerely yours,
Artur Seidel
Vice President and General Manager,
EB Automotive Software USA
Topics
In-Car Infotainment System Ford SYNC Open for Application Development
EB collaborates with Ford to integrate new applications into SYNC
EB GUIDE and Microsoft Expression Blend
A special thanks to Microsoft for showcasing the EB infotainment software products EB street director and EB GUIDE in their Microsoft Windows Embedded conference room.
Visteon Shows Navigation Software EB street director Connected to In-Vehicle Apps
Visteon showcased the white-label navigation solution EB street director on two of their head units – one of them running GENIVI, the other one running QNX.
HD Radio and Bing Integrated with Navigation Software EB street director - the Benefits of Modular Navigation Architecture
HD Radio, NAVTEQ and ST Microelectronics showcased EB street director interfacing with HD Radio traffic information and Microsoft presented EB street director integrated with the Bing search engine.
User Interfaces: the new AUDI A8 Multi Media Interface (MMI) with Touch Panel
One of the new features demonstrated at CES was an advanced touch panel with gesture recognition.
Service Corner
In-Car Infotainment System Ford SYNC Open for Application Development
Ford introduced in a key note speech new functionalities and versions of its in-car infotainment system Ford SYNC and presented EB as one of the partners in the SYNC ecosystem. EB is working with Ford Motor Company in providing phone application developers access to Ford SYNC. Thus an application programming interface (API), which acts as programming interface for a particular phone platform, will enable phone software developers to create new applications for the vehicle, taking advantage of the input mechanisms and vehicle data the Ford SYNC platform provides.
EB GUIDE and Microsoft Expression Blend
A special thanks to Microsoft for showcasing the EB infotainment software products EB street director and EB GUIDE in their Microsoft Windows Embedded conference room. EB has provided a new XAML plug-in to connect the HMI development tool EB GUIDE Studio to Microsoft Expression Blend™. This means that complex HMIs developed with Expression Blend and the description language XAML can now be easily specified and administered.
EB GUIDE Studio is used to develop graphical user interfaces and speech dialog solutions for the automotive market. Expression Blend is a design tool for the development of interactive user interfaces running on Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) or Microsoft Silverlight. Graphical elements are defined using XAML(Extensible Application Markup Language), a general description language developed by Microsoft Corp. for the interface design of applications.
Visteon Shows Navigation Software EB street director Connected to In-Vehicle Apps
Kudos to Visteon, they had their full infotainment portfolio on display including Virtual Instrument Clusters, one of which was recently deployed by Jaguar. The trend towards these virtual clusters is on - and with the HMI development tool EB GUIDE Studio today these user interfaces can easily be modeled and deployed.
Visteon showcased the white-label navigation software EB street director on two of their head units – one of them running GENIVI, the other one running QNX. Navigation software, of course, is a critical application in the vehicle and with the open navigation software EB street director, Tier1s like Visteon can deploy a state-of-the-art navigation solution on multiple platforms across their entire product portfolio.
HD Radio and Bing Integrated with Navigation Software EB street director - the Benefits of Modular Navigation Architecture
EB is not only continuously adding features to the navigation software EB street director, we are also continuing to refine the architecture to make it as easy as possible to seamlessly integrate the navigation software with external services and third party software. One example that was showcased by HD Radio, NAVTEQ and ST Microelectronics, was EB street director interfacing with HD Radio provided traffic information. Instead of having to significantly rework the navigation application for that service, it was possible to reuse a generic traffic interface. Similar interfaces like that are constantly being added so that EB street director can seamlessly integrate with additional services.
Another example was showcased by Microsoft where EB street director was integrated with the Bing™ search engine allowing for online search from within the navigation software. With location based services constantly evolving we believe that having the most flexible navigation software architecture in the business is the best way to being prepared for tomorrow´s requirements.
User Interfaces: the New AUDI A8 Multi Media Interface (MMI) with Touch Panel
At CES NVIDIA introduced the new AUDI A8 User Interface including an elaborate demonstrator at the show floor, an AUDI Q7 demo vehicle, and a presentation by Mr. Halliger from AUDI.
One of the new features demonstrated at CES was an advanced touch panel with gesture recognition. The HMI development tool EB GUIDE provided an innovative way to let AUDI test users experience this new interaction concept far before realization. Thus AUDI was able to bring the new HMI concepts to life as early as possible.
AUDI and EB have been working on AUDI's Multi-Media technology (MMI 3G), a powerful Automotive user interfaces project with many different country, feature and display variants and over 1400 different user dialogs.
Service Corner
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