Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications

Using Controller Widgets in 3D-GUI development with
end-to-end toolchain support
Simon Gerlach
HMI/Cluster, Switches
Volkswagen AG
PO Box 1148, D-38436 Wolfsburg, Germany
+49 5361 9-16989
simon.gerlach@volkswagen.de
ABSTRACT
Customer expectations are growing and so are technological
advances. This calls car manufacturers to develop increasingly
complex graphical user interfaces (GUI) in ever shorter time
periods and within unchanged budgets. Efficient processes are
required that are supported by specialized tools end-to-end.
Conventional tools for model-based GUI-development are based
on widgets, whose graphical appearance is programmed manually.
This means that during implementation of the final software the
design drafts that visual designers create have to be rebuilt
manually, as the necessary widgets have to be identified,
implemented and used to compose an identical-looking GUI. Such
approaches are inefficient and delay the adoption of new GUI
designs. They become even more problematic when creating
three-dimensional GUIs.
The paper presents a solution to overcome this problem by
reducing the widgets to controllers, which don’t have a specific
appearance. That allows using standard graphics editing programs
to create the visual design of the GUI, which is then imported into
the tools applied to create the final software. The developers use
the widgets available in those tools to connect the application
logic to elements of the imported designs. They can manipulate
existing graphical elements and trigger existing animations at
runtime. This approach allows integrating the designer’s and the
programmer’s tools seamlessly.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
D.2.2 [Software Engineering]: Design Tools and Techniques –
evolutionary prototyping, user interfaces; D.2.6 [Software
Engineering]: Programming Environments – Graphical
environments; D.2.9 [Software Engineering]: Management –
Programming teams; D.2.m [Software Engineering]:
Miscellaneous – Rapid prototyping; H.5.1 [Information
Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces – Graphical user
interfaces (GUI), Prototyping, Screen design; I.3.4 [Computer
Graphics]: Graphics Utilities – Graphics editors, Software
support; I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: Three-Dimensional
Graphics and Realism; I.3.8 [Computer Graphics]: Applications;
J.9 [Computer Applications]: Computer in other systems –
Consumer products.
General Terms
Management, Design, Human Factors, Standardization,
Performance.
Keywords
User Interface, HMI, GUI, 3D-GUI, Automotive, Cluster,
Copyright held by author(s).
AutomotiveUI’11, November 29-December 2, 2011, Salzburg, Austria.
Adjunct Proceedings.
Stefan Schraml
Product Manager HMI Solutions
Fujitsu Semiconductor Embedded Sol. Austria GmbH
Semmelweisstraße 34, 4020 Linz, Austria
+43 732 90 305 249
stefan.schraml@at.fujitsu.com
Infotainment system.
1. BACKGROUND
An appealing and user-friendly design of the human-machine
interfaces (HMI) is an important parameter for the success of
consumer products in the market [1]. This also applies in the case
of automobiles, which are equipped with increasingly powerful
hardware that enables the introduction of new software based
features for entertaining and informing the passengers. Despite the
fact that the range of these functions is continuously growing,
users demand simple handling and an appealing graphical design
of these systems. Furthermore, user expectations from the rapidly
evolving consumer-electronics market carry over to the
automotive one. This fact, along with the shortened lifecycles of
automobile generations, leaves very little time for developing
complex HMIs.
Car manufacturers (OEMs) continually extend their product
portfolio by adding new models that have to be differentiated
from each other. One way in which this is achieved is by altering
the customer perceptible parts such as the HMI software. This
leads to a need for developing a growing number of different
complex HMI software variants in even shorter time periods [2,3].
The high product quality that is essential to automotive
applications has to be assured and not sacrificed because of the
short development cycles. In order to achieve this OEMs have to
continuously optimize their HMI development processes (Figure
1).
Figure 1 – Rising complexity number of variants vs. available
development time and costs
1.1 Iterative-Parallel Development Processes
Since the available development timeframe is considerably
shortened the individual development steps cannot be carried out
in a strictly sequential manner. Instead, they have to be worked on
in parallel. In order for the system to match the user’s
expectations early HMI prototypes have to be repeatedly
evaluated in customer clinics. For this reason the development
processes need to be structured iteratively to allow for
incorporating the evaluation feedback.