28 PLANES, TRAINS & AUTOMOBILES Connected Cars
eep your eyes on the road, your hand upon the wheel,” sang Jim Morrison of The Doors. But that was in an age of seatbelt-less Ford
Mustangs careening down Laurel Canyon Boulevard, drivers flicking cigarette ash out onto the dry Southern California grass. The future of driving – maybe the not too distant future – is going to be something else entirely. Within a decade the self-driving or autonomous vehicle is going to be commonplace. Gone will be the days of piloting your vehicle through traffic like Han Solo through an asteroid field. Your car will be steering itself – and more safely than you could ever dream of doing. In the meantime, you’ll just be sitting there, doing…what? Well, a growing number of car companies are betting you’ll be consuming content – video content. In-car video systems are already a mature technology; DVD players and flip- down screens have been available for as long as 20 years. Seat-back video options are becoming commonplace – an iPad hanging from the headrest has been de-stressing long family drives for some years, and there’s a variety of new seat-back video products available that offer tethering to networks or old-fashioned DVD players. The car traveller is a captive audience – strapped in and committed for the duration of their voyage, the untapped potential for delivering content to, not to mention advertising to, that audience is enormous. An iPad hanging from a headrest is still a viable way for a traveller to watch content, but car manufacturers are seeing in connected video a whole new opportunity for enhancing their brands and the driving experience they offer. READY DRIVER ONE Media-enabled vehicles are becoming a high profile showing at the CES show in Las Vegas. This year, Audi exhibited connected “car-to-x” technology, designed to allow cars to share data with each other and operate more quickly, efficiently and safely as a vehicle “swarm”. Audi also debuted Holoride, which teamed them up with Disney to bring VR experiences to passengers in cars. Holoride was developed by German tech entrepreneurs Nils Wollny, also head of digital business at Audi, Marcus Kühne, project lead of Audi’s VR experience and Audi software engineer Daniel Profendiner. At CES, Holoride debuted with a game called Marvel’s Avengers: Rocket’s Rescue Run. In Holoride, the motion of the car itself intelligently incorporated into the VR
THE BEAUTY OF IT FROM A CONTENT COMPANY PERSPECTIVE IS THAT YOU’RE NOT CANNIBALISING THEMARKET YOU ALREADY HAVE
entertainment which they hope will mean a revolution for their businesses and for the content industry. DRIVING CONNECTION Access cut its teeth in mobile networks and launched the first mobile web browser in the 1980s. The company now provides software solutions to connected and mobile devices including the connected car. Access Europe, based in Oberhausen, Germany, specialises in both digital TV, IOT, and automotive connectivity with a focus on HTML5 and web technologies. Many of the worlds’ leading car brands use Access software for their connected infotainment units. Any given new Jaguar will have four Access-powered browsers operating in the vehicle simultaneously. Jaguar uses HTML5 browsers even for displays of air conditioning and comfort controls, which allows them to easily rebrand for each of its car models. The company also has a speciality in media sharing technology, allowing content
content, with experiences tailored to match the length of the passenger journey and incorporate the quirks of the terrain. The company claims that a passenger having a VR experience is less likely to experience any motion sickness. Counterintuitive though this may sound, motion sickness is often triggered by the conflict of the inner ear sensing movement that the eyes don’t register. A VR experience providing a context for that sensation of motion should decrease the level of nausea – at least theoretically. Audi started on the Holoride experience four years ago, and brought Disney in only in the last year, but the company hopes to make it an open platform, giving creators the ability to create content for any car. An SDK should be available this year and the company aims to make content widely available on the platform within three years. Audi’s VR experiments are at the more dramatic end of the in-car content spectrum, but manufacturers are developing a variety of solutions for in-car
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