How Will These Tech-trends Shape the Future of Automotive Design?
A designer’s take on the showcases at the 2019 Tokyo Motor Show.
It’s been a big week in Japan’s metropolis. With automotive manufacturers and designers from all over the globe gathering at the massive public gathering that is the Tokyo Motor Show, we couldn’t miss the chance to join in on the fun and see what OEMs and suppliers have been up to.
The following is a list of emerging technologies that give us a glimpse at what the future holds for cars and what that might mean for design.
1. Lightfield displays
Multiple suppliers showed off their 3D panels. When inspected with close attention, these had been layered with additional interface elements to create the illusion that they are only a few millimeters apart from each other. The accompanying images show off concepts of panels with incredible depth to display. Entire blocks of buildings shown on the navigation system look like they were actually inside the car.
When the pixel density finally catches up to our demands, which have been spoiled by retina-level resolutions, this will prove to be a very interesting technology.
For now, it seems these narrowly stacked layers will have to do. It’s hard to imagine a way to show these concepts without all the cosmetic gimmicks, like the ones we’ve seen come and go in the smartphone industry.
2. Head-up-Displays
The majority of the roped-off concept cars flashed giant HUDs, leaving them too far away to tell how they were actually being utilized. The production cars on the floor, however, rarely had any of that see-through UI, and if they did, it was a far cry from our futuristic visions.
What will content and designs look like when the hardware has matured and adoption has reached a critical point? This is the challenge waiting for designers. How do you guarantee the accessible contrast of UI elements against a real and unpredictable background, like the huge, virtual UI that will be projected onto streets and buildings surrounding the passenger.
3. V2P and V2I — New Interfaces for Increasing Autonomy
As commercial and personal vehicles make more unsupervised decisions, there’s a growing need to think about how they learn about their environment and how other traffic participants can understand what it will do next.
There are two important terms we use to describe these types of interactions:
- Infrastructure-to-vehicle or I2V/V2I interfaces. These include street-lamps and -lights equipped with cameras to inform nearby vehicles about traffic conditions.
- Vehicle-to-pedestrian or V2P communication has a more direct connection to HMI in that it describes the interface between the machine and humans who are on the outside.
4. Biometrics
There’s a race to create the most advanced, personal in-car-assistant, promising levels of comfort and safety we have never seen before. Some of the proud displays of technological advancement, however, err on the side of dystopia.
Interiors are equipped with innumerable cameras, thermal imaging sensors, and lasers to feed the AI with the data necessary to determine if a passenger is fit to drive, happy about their next meeting or feeling a bit cold.
It will be the designer’s responsibility to determine how far to push within the legal limits to strike the right balance of convenience and privacy.
So—is the Future now?
There’s a lot of emerging tech converging in the car, but it remains to be seen how this will actually be implemented and blend together into one seamless experience.
The future of mobility seems to be developed much like its past and present: in siloed engineering departments thinking about individual pieces of the bigger puzzle. Nevertheless, it is our hope that OEMs really do become Original Experience Manufacturers.
At Goodpatch, we envision a future where implementation of these capabilities happens in a human-centered design-driven process. The tech-driven development that’s still commonplace today might not solve tomorrows challenges.
The convergence of hardware and software, autonomous driving, and voice interfaces are just a few use cases where OEMs and suppliers need to shift their focus to the driver and passenger user experience.
We want to do our part and we’ve been building our own XR-prototyping tool for automotive user experience design, enabling the automotive industry to create and test products using touch, gesture, voice and eye-tracking input without the need to code.
Don’t forget to check out our other stories on automotive design:
