Automotive UI 2011 Salzburg

Automotive User Interfaces conference, 2011 November.

Automotive User Interfaces conference was held in Salzburg in early December 2011. Some morsels from the conference:

• Workshop on Natural User Interfaces. (twitter #autonui)
  Winners of brainstorming for in-vehicle applications for quarter-century in the future, when the "driver" becomes part-time "traveler." Some useful apps to keep this traveler awake and ready to become "driver" at any time:

• Send a song to another driver (on your road or among your friends)
• The "love tangible" embedded in the car seat, that enables a boyfriend and girlfriend to communicate by touch while in different vehicles. Pressure sensors communicate shape in one direction, and a tender touch in the other direction. The seat can also become warm.
• Voice messages for others along the route, searchable by audio hashtags similar to an all-audio version of twitter. Also similar to twitter, all messages stored on the cloud and can be data-mined by highway planners, patrol, maintenance, etc.
• Volkswagen is working on smartphone/HUD interface but it can't distinguish between passenger and driver. This is what FCC says it needs if we're to avoid their recommending to NHTSA a blanket ban on cellphones in the vehicle. (FCC 2010 November at distraction.gov)
• Georgia Tech uses an excellent driving simulator from University of Iowa called Simuride. Cost is reasonable, and tech support is not unreasonably expensive. Scenarios developed on Simuride should be able to run on full NADS simulator, saving much much time in development/debugging costs.
• Emotion mapping standard model is Valence vs. Arousal. The 3rd dimension is Dominance.
• Garret Weinberg from Nuance is trying to use vehicle parameters to aid the dialog system.  (I'll send him info about PLX which transmits CAN-bus parameters via 802.11)
• Next year's conference will be Oct.17-19 at Portsmouth NH near UNH.
• Chieko Kohshima and Dr. Adachi are in Germany now. At ATR, Chieko was extremely knowledgeable about HR procedures re foreigners working in Japan. She has finished her studies in international business at Nagoya University.
• Group Photo (taken by professional, part of a flickr collection)