Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications

SafeTRIP [8] is an Integrated Project (IP) co-funded by the
European Commission (DG Research) with 20 partners
from 7 European countries, representing partners in
research and business with a wide range of interests and
expertise, coordinated by the motorway company Sanef of
France. The partners include road operators, satellite
companies, research centres, transport operator, insurance
companies, equipment manufacturers and academia.
SafeTRIP started in October 2009 and will last 3.5 years;
one of its main objectives is to improve the use of road
transport infrastructures and to optimize the alert chain in
case of incidents – this will be achieved through an
integrated system from data collection to safety service
provision.
SafeTRIP Platform
While being open and capable of integrating other
communication technologies (such as Ground Networks),
the SafeTRIP platform operates over satellite on the Sband
frequency range, which is optimized for two-way
communication for On-Board Units (OBUs) in the vehicle
(Figure 3). The S-band communication requires only a
small omni-directional antenna on the vehicle - making it
suitable for the mass market. Unlike cellular networks, the
broadcast capability of the S-band is well suited for
sending large amounts of rich information to multiple
vehicles – which is important to provide a scalable and
sustainable solution to address the need for rich
information by drivers.
Info Explorer Service
SafeTRIP Info Explorer service runs on the SafeTRIP
platform and is designed as a personalized information
portal for vehicle occupants offering travel-related
information (including POIs). As shown in Figure 4,
information from multiple sources (e.g. security alerts,
traffic information, local regulations, weather forecast,
POIs, etc.) is collected by an aggregator system in the
service centre. The rich information – which is a mix of
static (e.g. shop facilities at a petrol station) and dynamic
(e.g. current fuel prices at the petrol station) types - is then
transmitted to all vehicles equipped with the SafeTRIP
OBU using datacasting technologies to reach a large
number of vehicles with one single transmission.
The geolocalised information, filtered based on the
vehicle’s position and the user preferences, can then be
formatted and presented to the users using either the
vehicle’s inbuilt interface (video and/or audio) or the enduser
devices (e.g. tablets, smartphones or laptops) through
a local web-server. These devices communicate with the
OBU via WiFi. Users can explore information within the
system primarily through topical information channels,
such as hotels, restaurants, news, places to visit, etc. In the
current prototype, the number of available information
channels is limited - acquiring rich travel-related
information that is geo-coded, includes images, a
description and that is also available for offline archival
and re-use requires significant effort.
Figure 4 - SafeTRIP Info Explorer Architecture
The current prototype offers 4 channels for the London
area:
1. Hotels (with images, geo-codes and rich text descriptions)
2. Public toilets (with images, geo-codes and textual location
information)
3. Petrol stations (with images, geo-codes, brand, shop
facilities, opening times, contact details)
4. Parking (with images, features, address)
In the UI of the application, the Focus-Metaphor Interface
(FMI) has been integrated with a map backdrop, which
provides preview information of relevant SafeTRIP Info
Explorer items in the vicinity of the current GPS or user
selected location overlaid on top of the map. In its current
iteration, SafeTRIP Info Explorer is optimized for the
landscape format (Figure 5).
TYPESET TEXT
Figure 5 - UI of Info Explorer
The first 7 results are displayed as previews through the
FMI map overlay in a semi-circular manner- accounting
for Miller’s famous considerations of short-term memory
capacity [4]. A preview consists of an image, a descriptive
phrase and a labelled reference to the marker on the map
in the top left corner. The Channels button toggles the