Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications

Gartner, Smartphone sells have grown rapidly in 2011 with
108 Mio. Units shipped in Q2 2011 which is a plus of 74%
in comparison to Q2 2010 [10]. This illustrates, that any
proprietary platform offered by a single OEM is probably
far less attractive to 3 rd Party Developers than established
Smartphone platforms with a huge user base.
OEM Vehicles
produced
OS Units
shipped
Toyota 8.56 Symbian 111.6
G.M. 8.48 Android 67.2
Volkswagen 7.34 RIM 47.5
Hyundai 5.76 iOS 46.6
Ford 4.99 Microsoft 12.4
Others 42.6 Others 11.4
Total 77.7 Total 296.6
Table 1: Top five car producers and Smartphone platforms
2010 (units in Million) [8] [9]
According to this and the before mentioned lifetime issues,
we believe that it is necessary for future automotive
platforms to stay compatible with as many other platforms
as possible in order to attract 3 rd Party Developers.
Web Application Frameworks extend standard browsers by
additional platform functions like telephony or contacts
access. Standardization of such device functions is ongoing
at the World Wide Web Consortium [11]. By utilizing a
Web Application Framework which is implemented for
many Smartphone platforms, our framework and its
extensions need to be adapted only once for each new
platform. Afterwards, the same HTML5 applications can be
executed on all platforms without the need for adjustments
or recompiling. As both sides interpret the same HTML5
code, it is possible to exchange applications in both
directions – the car might offer applications to mobile
devices as well.
REASONS FOR INCLUDING 3 rd PARTY DEVELOPERS
While standard infotainment systems have a manageable
set of features, the quantity of available applications might
grow quickly when 3 rd Party Developers get involved, as
the recent history of mobile phone platforms has proved.
However, as mentioned before IVI is a niche market
compared to Smartphone application development, and
experts are rare. This leads to a tradeoff between a limited
number of IVI applications developed by vehicle experts
and a huge number of IVI applications developed by 3 rd
Party Developers as depicted in figure 3.
Number of
applications
average
developer
demanded
expert knowledge
vehicular
expert
Figure 3: Trade-off for 3 rd party IVI applications
As stated by automotive experts in [1], software costs will
grow to the half of the overall costs of IVI systems in the
near future. These experts believe, that involving 3 rd Party
Developers “would yield a 30% total system development
cost reduction or approximately a 50% savings in the
software development” [1].
ADVANTAGES FOR CAR SPECIFIC ADAPTION
The use of HTML5 allows a fine-grained adjustment to the
target IVI system, because the separation of logic and
design is strongly integrated in HTML. In order to
automate platform-specific adoptions, we use a set of
standard graphical user interface elements. For this reason,
different style sheets for these elements need to be created
only once for each new platform. This is a big advantage
over other solutions because applications do not need to be
individually tailored for every target IVI system in order to
provide a platform specific look and feel. Additionally, a
huge number of 3 rd Party Developers is already familiar
with HTML5. The development for HTML5 is
comparatively simple, there are many existing tools and
intermediate results can be tested in an ordinary Web
Browser.
The utilized Web Application Framework allows for
extensions by a plug-in concept. It is possible to adjust the
framework to custom needs and extend and update it later
on.
In order to deactivate features that are inappropriate while
driving, HTML5 content and layout descriptions can be
used directly. It is not necessary to provide additional
metadata for adjustments.
SECURE EXECUTION OF FOREIGN APPLICATIONS
As described earlier, secure execution of 3 rd party software
in cars requires appropriate protection mechanisms. Using
Web Technologies for applications and executing them in a
Browser sandbox appears promising, as premium cars
already provide Web Browsers. In our solution, access to
local vehicle functions is currently protected by the browser
sandbox and by a gateway we have in place for
communication with underlying vehicle hardware. While
our research prototype does not contain any mechanisms to
authenticate and authorize devices and applications, we
agree that a productive implementation should include
mechanisms to only execute tested and approved
applications.
ENSURING DRIVER SAFETY
Providing driver safety is a lot more complicated for 3 rd
party applications than for native IVI functions. Currently,
the implication of certain HMI characteristics to driver
distraction is a matter of research [12], [13]. For this
reason, and because of individually different driver
behavior, it is impossible at the moment to predict the
imposed level of driver distraction just by analyzing the
components of an application. Only empirical
measurements allow for rough estimations [13].
Unfortunately, quality tests like driving simulations are
unsuitable for the majority of 3 rd Party Developers because
they are complex, time consuming and costly as they