(This article replaces draft of an article prematurely published)
Driving an S-Class, the flagship of the Mercedes line, is to be immersed in technology. For example, there is forward-looking radar on the windshield that spots a bump in the road and prepares the S550 to float over it. Yet, it is annoying that a car spilling over with technology still makes you take your eyes off the road to turn up the radio. I make a mental note to check the owner’s manual, the most printed and least read book in the world.
Answering the call is Mike Juran, CEO of Altia. Altia has just released its annual report on Graphical User Interface Global Trends, so we trust them to give us details on the state of the art in UI for embedded devices, which includes machine tools, wearable devices—and most importantly for this article, cars.
Mike Juran, CEO of Altia.
Why does a very expensive late model car not have the same ease of use as a smartphone?
He does his best to be kind to the automobile industry. It is, after all, 80 percent of his business. He resists saying, “You should have bought a Cadillac.” The Cadillac LYRIQ’s UI (shown above) has been designed by Altia, and I’m sure Juran wants to say it is easier to use than a Mercedes. But he resists and plays along with an annoyed editor and concedes that, overall, the automotive industry has some catching up to do when compared to our smartphones.
Why does the automotive industry insist on reinventing the wheel? Why not just duplicate the smart phone screen on the car dashboard? All they have to do is provide a dock for the smart phone. Isn’t that what Apple’s CarPlay and Android Auto do in today’s cars, anyway? Isn’t that all we need for music, for GPS, for taking and making calls, etc.?
Apparently, it’s not so simple. Your phone can have your undivided attention. When you are driving, you should not be distracted by it.
What does Altia do, exactly?
Altia specializes in creating UIs for embedded systems, whether they are in CNC machines, your new IoT-enabled dishwasher or your latest Cadillac SUV. Unlike UIs in design and engineering applications, embedded system UIs, also known as HMI (human machine interfaces) don’t usually have the luxury of big bright screens. Sometimes the display is just a line of text, and the controls are only buttons and knobs. That makes getting the UI right more challenging.
“We’re working under a lot more constraints. The size of the screen is a big constraint. A wearable device, like an insulin pump or a fitness device, has a very limited display,” says Juran. “We have cost constraints. A microwave that costs $200 total won’t have a very powerful microprocessor. By comparison, a device could have a $500 or $600 microprocessor. You have to squeeze all of the UI goodness that people have come to expect in these products into really small packages with cost constraints. We work with processors that are not as fast and have a lot less memory. They could have small batteries and be expected to be on for a very long time. Not like a device that can be recharged twice a day.”
“We’re in hundreds of different models of vehicles and designed into over a million vehicles around the world,” says Juran.
However, it is the other end of the scale that gets Juran most excited. Some of the new cars have big bright, curved OLED displays that blend beautifully into the dashboard.
That’s the latest technology. He is not a fan of cars that look as if they have just stuck an iPad over the console. Juran doesn’t mention Tesla by name; he doesn’t have to. Tesla was at first envied for adopting a big tablet form factor as a departure from the small, boring and relatively uninformative dashboard displays in cars at that time. But that was a dog-year ago. The best dashboards now are bright, customizable, touch sensitive—and in luxury vehicles, big.
For its 2021 model, Mercedes introduced an integrated, full-width OLED display for its new all-electric EQS sedan. The MBUX Hyperscreen is a 5K touchscreen blended into the dashboard. But, strangely enough, the company’s gas-powered S-class vehicles pay homage to Tesla with a big tablet sticking out of the center console.
For that reason, Juran is hot on heads-up displays. The driver can keep their eyes on the road and still get vital information without being distracted.
Should all commands in a car be voice commands?
An automobile environment is not conducive to voice commands, says Juran. Noise and music can obscure voice input.
How would you compare software for computers and devices to software for cars?
“We’re a software company that develops interfaces for embedded systems,” Juran explains. “We have a platform that enables manufacturers who build products with displays to create a modern, hopefully very usable GUI model that they can turn into deployable code to run on these embedded systems. Unlike UI development environment for an Android, Apple device or a desktop, our applications are for embedded systems developers. Automotive companies fit in that category as vehicles have single-purpose devices that need a GUI, a display and some way of interacting with the user—essentially embedded systems. That’s very different from a general purpose mobile or computer platform where you're creating an app environment that allows people to add and subtract apps as necessary. It's a completely different problem space that we focus on.”
How does your GUI development platform differ from conventional methods?
“We did a lot of head-scratching to figure out why can't we create GUIs,” Juran continues. “It’s the process. It starts with the user experience developer and then goes down the line to the graphical authoring environment and it ends up as something completely different. So, we moved the graphical authoring environment to day one. We made something the user experience expert can use from day one. They don't have to be a developer. They don't have to know anything about hardware requirements, how much memory is available. Once they build that model in our authoring environment, it creates the code automatically. The automatic code generators know everything there is to know about the microprocessor, how much memory, the power requirements. The code is immediately downloaded into this device and runs the GUI.”
“The user experience expert can see how it works on the physical hardware, not on a laptop. They can say, ‘Oh, that doesn't look right,’ and fix it, or if it takes a developer or specialized application, such as Photoshop, hand it off. Then the user experience expert goes back to his authoring environment with the changes, pushes the button and regenerates the code for that device. It’s a tight loop. There’s not a team of software developers in the middle, making changes in order to optimize it for the hardware. Instead, the user experience expert gets to create the UI from day one.”
Use of this UI platform requires no programming experience?
“Correct. This summer we had four high school interns and had them build a UI. They had never written a line of code in their lives, and they've never used our platform. They were able to create the UI for a blender. They even went all the way down to reference hardware.”
The UI platform understands how to optimize for different microprocessors?
“We spent a lot of time optimizing for each individual microprocessor family. A product may have a Qualcomm, Intel or Samsung microprocessor or microcontroller. We know every microprocessor and every controller that the embedded industry uses, and we have specific code generators for each of them. That’s what lets us fit 10 pounds of potatoes into a 5-pound sack. You could say that's our whole reason for existence,” Juran says.
You mentioned power as a constraint. Don’t cars have power to spare these days?
Power consumption of the software is becoming more and more of an issue with the bigger displays and electric vehicles. The bigger displays can require as much power as a gaming computer. That’s hundreds of Watts. Every time you we turn them on, that will take two or three miles off the range of our EVs.
To be continued. In Part 2, we find out what it takes to make a large automotive display beautiful, useful… and safe.