Gadgetory

car making it's long been based on heavy iron but today that or is increasingly different it's software now wireless displays but what odds do car makers stand in a game that wilts even legendary electronics companies I'm Brian Cooley and in this episode of seen that conversations we take you two Volkswagens Electronics research lab in Silicon Valley and there the heat is on lab director Peter ill and his team to come up with innovations that they think could make their company the number-one automaker by 2018 Peter research here involves what what kind of technology are you putting in cars at a place like this yeah via the electronics research lab we deal with infotainment systems driver assistance systems with the you machine interface driver distraction is a big issue we also do a lot of software development work for our products so basically you get to work on all the stuff that is really hot button in cars these days yeah it's definitely true software's one of the big topics at the moment especially in the entertainment area we have to deal with lots of intelligence of the components in the car and the Silicon Valley is definitely a place where innovations in that field happen this is attractive Peter what have you done to me you put an eye tracker on you on your head so this is watching my eyes this is what you're watching your eye and this camera is facing forward to see where you looking to what's is going to measure this measures visual distraction one of the things we can measure with this simulator and can measure everything else too but visual distraction is one of the key topics while driving to make fiving safe this is gonna figure out where I looked when I shouldn't have been looking too often in that direction correct all right so put this guy in drive and start driving okay but I didn't pick up my smartphone or any point which a lot of folks would do yeah how do you get people to put this down and look here how do you make this head unit tastier than the phone that I'm more familiar with because I use it all the time this is kind of the big part you have to make that the infotainment system in a way that it's attractive and that you would like to use it visually and on the other side we have to make it in the way that it's safe while driving all right Peter now here's a heat map that comes out of that simulator what am I looking at yeah actually you can see the red and yellow and green areas the mall rat you see the morph new looked at this area okay so you can see the view it's mainly out of this is good this is good there's a couple of dedicated areas focus areas on the infotainment system yeah farewell time was spent here here here over and over most car makers agree now they can't roll their own on every experience consumers want familiar services they already use out of the car to follow them into the car so we're zooming in here I'm in the Google Earth and then when I get beyond the 50-yard resolution that I see here throw your own 30 yard and then look at that now that's not that's not something I've seen before that street view and if I go to this pad I can scroll around my position just like I can if I'm sitting at a pc browser tech companies like Google have updates cycles measured in months at most car makers in years how do those two industries ever mesh their gears the main goal is to have a modular system because that's what the smart phone companies do they do not release and completely new develop smartphone every half year so they all have their modules and they combine them you package them new together we have the same system below the same operating system or the same hardware and it's only packaged new added some new functionality to that here's a small example of how automakers move at a pace more like electronics using technologies like this 3d printer to rapid prototype ideas today not next week let me show you something now that 3d printer that we have here in the ERL made this whole this isn't like that thousand-dollar 3d printer you've got at home that's real cool but this machine was made ready to go this wasn't assembled later same goes for this chain it came out this way that's amazing what we've seen here today is progressive and new but it's no longer niche or odd this is the car making game today the technology you've seen here it's the last bastion in our digital lives where there's a wall left to be broken down so our behaviors can flow across all the places where we live in car and outs you