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Get into a car anywhere in the world and you are pretty much guaranteed that you will understand how to drive it. Cars have the ultimate user interface and Formula 1 cars perhaps represent the pinnacle of this UI, with the most demanding requirements.

As recently as 1992, F1 steering wheels were round with 3 buttons (neutral, drinking water supply, radio), but since the advent of paddle gear changes there has been a sudden explosion of electronics and feature driven complexity.

The complexity is ubiquitous, all 11 Formula 1 teams produce cars with more or less the same multi button design allowing adjustment and tweaks of traction and aerodynamics from the wheel itself. Unlike a road car, space and focus constraints mean that the entire dashboard is on the steering wheel. This is something that will no doubt be copied, unnecessarily, in consumer cars in future, but would that be a UI improvement?

Read full article at OObject

Chrysler Concept Imagines a Car Without Buttons – Wheels Blog – NYTimes.com by Azadeh Ensha

“You won’t see a single button on this vehicle from the doors to the interior to the infotainment system,” said Jason Monroe, a spokesman for Chrysler, while demonstrating Chrysler’s 200C concept, a four-door electric car.

Mr. Monroe helped lead the electronics development of the 200C’s iQ Power touch-screen system, first introduced at this year’s Detroit auto show.

The production-ready system was patented by the Nartron Corporation, which also owns the technology for the human-interface design used by other companies, including Apple. That may help explain the iPhone-inspired features behind iQ Power. “It’s what Apple did with the iPhone,” said Norman Rautiola, Natron’s chief executive.

Specifically, iQ Power lets drivers use any smartphone as a virtual key fob to control a host of functions, including locking and unlocking the vehicle’s doors and trunk and rolling the windows up and down. With their smartphones, users can also access a live interior shot of the vehicle as well as check on the status of their home’s security alarm, carbon dioxide and smoke detectors.

By touching and dragging a virtual trackball on the car’s curved dashboard, the driver and front-seat passenger can also control the vehicle’s music library, which replicates Apple’s album art cover-flow feature. The media library moves with the phone, so users can customize and take their settings with them.

The passenger side of the 200C deploys a UConnect tablet so passengers can access the car’s entertainment features and send recommendations to the driver. Passengers can also access the settings through a console-mounted passenger interface.

According to Mr. Rautiola, the 200C is expected to be released in 2012.

Metrics and numbers about design are just one way to understand the world, as an equal partner with our broader design understanding.  Quantitative data doesn’t account for many things.  Balance is always needed.  Sure usability can help you measure efficiency and satisfaction levels but does your product deliver happiness or joy?  There are lots of things numbers and quantitative methods don’t adequately account for.  “The data is simply an aide to my judgment. The data never tells me what to do”, Alan G. Lafley.

The innovation crowd makes a fundamental mistake: that a complex market problem can be solved by a good analytical design. If you build the “process” right, and put the right “validation” and “methodology” in place, using more technology with more investment in the “process”, you’ll get a better product–wrong!In reality, winning a market battle requires a very complex equation of advance performance, marketing insight and appropriate design. We use the term “look & feel” often when talking about the right design approach. Both “look” and “feel” can not be quantified or learned in engineering schools. These terms are intuitive to the knowledgeable and obtuse to the novice. In reality the “look & feel” of a good product is a nuanced, multi-faceted approach to technical constraints, target demographics and trend-forecasting combined with a special sauce–the designer’s talent and intuition.

Such a complex formula for design success can not be resolved by analytical methods. Time and time again I see metrics and focus groups fail in predicting the outcome of a design effort. Many times excellent design work is butchered by analytics (Think GM for a minute…). Human culture is ageless, and excellent design always brings technology and our cultural heritage together. The Sony Walkman made music, an essential human need, portable. The Kindle (especially the new one) may become the “Walkman” of reading. With that cultural quality both products are a triumph of design over innovation.

The question is essentially “how do we make decisions about design?” The answer is: “not by analytics alone!” The making of a good design–say a great mobile phone design–is so complex that the only way is by relying on the designer’s intuition in solving this nuanced formula. If the issue is the reliability of this method, the answer is the designer’s track record in resolving such challenges. Some people have more talent than others–that’s a fact of life.

Just Say No To ‘Innovation’ | The New Deal | Fast Company

The convergence of entertainment, communications, and computing in cars just took a big step forward with Futuremark’s Audi in-car UI demonstrated at NVISION.

“Hey Kitt, where’s Fry’s? I need to upgrade the 1GB Nvidia card in my Audi!”

Some companies are better at building the future of user interfaces than others. Nissan recognized this and hired Polyphony Digital, the Gran Turismo team, for the GT-R in-car screens. The Futuremark dashboard concept takes it one step further. The system is a full, live dashboard environment all shown in 3D graphics. From the gauge cluster to the GPS screen, the entire thing can all change on the fly thanks to OpenGL graphics. The possibilities are literally endless with this type of a display. I can think of some immediate benefits from a usability and user experience perspective…

• The entire dashboard UI could be localized on-the-fly. Say your wife is Japanese and you are German, no problem.  The entire dashboard text could switch.  Language and mph or km/h could also be set and switched on the fly.
• The GPS could be displayed full screen, behind the wheel, instead of the gauges. If the driver is lost, they’re going to want to focus on directions.  Don’t bother with a typical nav in the center console or an even a tiny portable unit, switch the entire dash to be the GPS.
• The UI could be reconfigured on the fly to meet the specific needs of the driver at that time. Say the driver knows he’s on the highway for several hours, the speedometer could zoom to just the range (55-70mph) to allow the driver to focus on that particular speed range.  Say the driver needs to focus on just the RPM’s like on a racetrack, the entire UI could redraw into one giant RPM gauge with clear redline and upshifting lights.  The speedometer is unimportant at this time and would not be displayed.  A lap timer could also be the focus.  Or better yet, say the driver wants to see realtime telemetry data from the shocks and springs like a Forza or Gran Turismo playback.  No problem.
• Add in wireless data access (WIMAX, WIFI, 3G, or EDGE) and the possibilties are even more endless. Ala Dash, realtime traffic, Google or Yahoo! local maps, local companies, ratings, realtime gas prices etc. can all be displayed and accessed on the full dashboard rather than the tiny Dash.
• GPS should have full access to the real vehicle data…speed, RPM, engine temps, fuel, mpg, etc. The GPS could now notify the driver when fuel level is low before the driver starts that 50 mile stretch of highway.  Based on the location, the GPS could notify the driver when the speedlimit on particular road changes.  The GPS could notify the driver of approaching speed cameras, display them in a picture, and tell the driver how much to slow down.
• OpenGL based graphics would allow for some amazing visualizations and allow outstanding GPS mapping capability. Think Gran Turismo or Forza2 real time telemetry.

Futuremark Announces Groundbreaking Automotive Demo for Audi at NVISION

San Jose, California – Aug. 25th, 2008 – Futuremark, creators of the industry standard benchmarking software for graphics performance for OpenGL ES and DirectX APIs, has created a demonstration for Audi’s In-Car Graphics System future concept to be shown for the first time at NVISION in San Jose. It delivers a fully rendered car dashboard and all instruments shown in a 3D view, including 3D navigation using stunning and realistic effects and viewsas well as a 3D car infotainment system with vehicle info and cool 3D environmental controls rendered in real-time for on-road Automotive usage.

“We are delighted to work with Audi due to their professional expertise in the car industry,” said Petri Talala, Vice President and General Manager of the Handheld and Embedded Group at Futuremark Oy., “Audi is a leader in this field with sophisticated, real-time rendered and high quality content available for future infotainment systems, and being able to have our graphics engine experts and artists contribute to this effort is very special for Futuremark.”

In-Car graphics systems are evolving rapidly with an increasing amount of digital instrumentation used inside of automotive designs. Khronos APIs such as OpenGL and OpenGL ES will be widely adopted for rendering backend of digital instrumentation. With this new automotive demo, Futuremark is showing the flexibility of both its OpenGL ES engines and its art pipelines that were used to deliver this project on an entirely new platform to Audi’s delight. The Engines and Pipeline Tools used to create the demo are all available for licensing directly from Futuremark. Also offered are custom demo services for Automotive companies who want to show off tomorrows User Interface and Digital 3D designs for Automobiles today. Futuremark’s has an upcoming automotive benchmark that is in development which will utilize real-world use cases such as car dashboard, info-system, and navigation workloads based on OpenGL ES 1.x and ES 2.0.

For more information on having Futuremark create your Automotive vision or for more information concerning Futuremark’s Mobile and Embedded products, in Europe and Asia, contact Petri Talala. In North America contact Oliver Baltuch at the contact information below.

About Futuremark Corporation Futuremark Corporation serves the mobile industry with professional application performance analysis tools and workloads. Our world renowned product portfolio includes 3DMark®Mobile for OpenGL ES 1.x and OpenGL ES 2.0, VGMark™ for OpenVG 1.x, and SPMark™ for Symbian, Windows Mobile, Linux and mobile Java. In addition, we license digital content creation tool chain middleware to 3D application developers, chip vendors and handset manufacturers. For more information, please visit www.futuremark.com