Apps Present Opportunities, Safety Issues for Connected Mobile Electronics Market

SAN DIEGO -- Ensuring safety is the biggest issue facing the mobile technology market as cars become connected and smartphone technology is increasingly integrated into the mobile environment, panelists said at the CEA Industry Forum Tuesday. As cars become connected, either via smartphone or in upcoming connected head units, which are replacing radios and CD players, they'll be able to interact with the cloud, bringing in Internet radio services and apps that are currently available to consumers in other devices, panelists said.

"The first goal is to get devices in vehicles to connect safely,” said Ty Roberts, chief technology officer of Gracenote. Toward that end, companies are working on alternative control methods including the touch interface, voice and gesture. “You wave at your console and something happens. That’s the future of what’s going on,” he said. In most cases, new means of control will have to be developed for existing devices, he said. While the iPod has transformed the experience of listening to music in vehicles, its scrolling list controller is “absolutely the wrong thing to put in vehicles,” Roberts said. Comparing it to lists used in navigation systems, he said, “It’s way worse than an address book.” Gracenote has hidden the lists and converted the data to album covers organized by letters, which provides faster recognition, he said.

Down the road, multi-device control and integration has to evolve to accommodate various passengers’ content, Roberts said. “Harmonious integration” of the various people in the vehicle and management of cloud services will be challenges in the years to come, he said. With cloud interaction, the vehicle will have to decide “what to cache, what to download, what to make accessible,” he said, which is complicated by data such as movie ratings. “You may not want Terminator 3 available to your 2-year-old in the back seat,” he said.

The smartphone is the bridge to Internet-based content for Pioneer’s AppRadio receiver, said Ted Cardenas, director of marketing for Pioneer Car Electronics. Pioneer’s system uses the iPhone as the processor, storage capacity and network connectivity to bring apps “onto the dashboard,” Cardenas said, which allows Pioneer to “change the feature set” of existing products for the first time. The company added its latest app, StreamS HiFi, Monday, which brings “broadcast quality” AM/FM and Internet radio stations to the vehicle, he said. Pioneer acts as filter for the apps, tailoring the interface so that “we're passing content that would only be safe to do while you're operating a vehicle,” he said.

In the digital world, “the aspect of touch is gone,” said Michael Blicher, director of automotive business for Immersion, which specializes in haptics. The critical issue in a vehicle for drivers is to “minimize glance time,” he said. Blicher cited a government study that someone putting lipstick on in a car while driving can be a 30-second process broken down into smaller time elements during which time the lane variation can be “plus or minus 6 feet,” he said. Extending that distraction to electronics, drivers reaching for a station to bring up metadata of an album cover need to be able to do so without looking, he said. “Every time you re-glance, or don’t have confirmation, you're adding to the complexity of that interface,” he said. “You can’t just take an app that you were doing this on and replicate it,” he said. “You have to transform it.” Immersion technology imbeds a firmware code in products to create positive clicks or aesthetic effects to guide the driver, he said.

App content will also be an issue for safety, said Roberts of Gracenote, who suggested a regulating body to approve apps that will be used on the road. Some oversight will be needed “because there’s a safety issue there,” he said. “I don’t know that if you open up the app world to an infinite number of developers that it will self-regulate,” he said. If the automotive industry doesn’t come up with a way to work together on the various apps issues, “it leaves the door open for a large company to come up with a monolithic platform that dominates,” Roberts said. “That’s what happened with the iPhone.”