CrackBerry posts first peek at OnStar RemoteLink for BlackBerry PlayBook

Paul Leroux

This morning at CES, CrackBerry.com met up with QNX's Andrew Poliak for a walkthrough of the new OnStar RemoteLink app for the BlackBerry PlayBook.

If you aren't familiar with RemoteLink, it provides a very cool and powerful connection to OnStar-equipped vehicles. From the convenience of your tablet or phone, you can access gas mileage, tire pressure, and other information in real time; you can even remotely start your vehicle and unlock its doors.

Cooler yet, the new version running on the PlayBook boasts a user interface built entirely in HTML5. But enough blather from me. Roll the tape...



Did you know? QNX is the core OS for the PlayBook, but it's also the OS for OnStar and OnStar FMW.
 

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HTML5 is a great option for the risk-adverse

The conservative nature of automakers makes them ideal candidates for the brand-spanking new HTML5. Say what?

While this seems paradoxical, it is an interesting take-away from the discussion between TCS' director of engineering Michael Camp and our very own Andy Gryc. If you've got three minutes to spare, watch the latest video in our HTML5 series for the whole story. (As usual, don't miss the ending. ;-)

This interview of Michael Camp is the fourth in a series from QNX on HTML5.

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HTML5 and the software engineer

HTML5 appears to have a number of benefits for consumers and car manufacturers. But what is often good for the goose is not necessarily good for the developer. Talking to the guys in the trenches is critical to understanding the true viability of HTML5.

Andy Gryc and Sheridan Ethier, manager of the automotive development team at QNX, pair up for a technical discussion on HTML5. They explore whether this new technology can support rich user interfaces, how HTML5 apps can be blended with apps written in OpenGL, and if interprocess communication can be implemented between native and web-based applications.

So without further ado, here’s the latest in the educational series of HTML5 videos from QNX.



This interview of Sheridan Ethier is the third in a series from QNX on HTML5.

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Is HTML5 a good gamble?

As the consumer and automotive worlds continue to collide, HTML5 looks like a good bet. And not a long shot either. In fact, the odds are all automakers will eventually use it. But since the standard won’t be mature for some time yet, should you take a chance on it now? 

To answer this, Andy Gryc talks to Matthew Staikos of RIM. Matthew is the manager of the browser and web platform group at RIM, and has over 10 years of software development experience with a strong focus on WebKit for mobile and embedded systems. Matthew co-founded Torch Mobile, which was acquired by RIM for their browser technology.

Andy’s conversation with Matthew is the subject of the following video, the second in an educational series designed to get an industry-wide perspective on HTML5. 

This interview of Matthew Staikos is the second in a series from QNX on HTML5.

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What’s HTML5 got to do with automotive?

There’s been a lot of noise lately about HTML5. A September 2011 report by binvisions shows that search engines and social media web sites are leading the way toward adoption: Google, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Twitter, and plenty more have already transitioned to HTML5. Some are taking it even further: Facebook has an HTML5 Resource Center for developers and the Financial Times has a mobile HTML5 version of their website.

It won’t be long before HTML5 is ubiquitous. We think automakers should (and will) use it. 

To elucidate the technology and its relevance, we’ve created a series of educational videos on the topic. Here is the first in that series. Interviews with partners, customers, and industry gurus will soon follow. 

This simple overview is the first in a series from QNX on HTML5. (Personally I like the ending the best.)

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Seamless connectivity is for more than online junkies

As much as I’m not always enamored with sitting behind a computer all day, I find being off the grid annoying. Remember this email joke?

You know you’re an online junkie when you:
• wake up at 3:00 am to go to the bathroom and stop to check your email on the way back to bed
• rarely communicate with your mother because she doesn’t have email
• check your inbox. It says ‘no new messages,’ so you check it again 

Even though this joke circulated several years ago, it still strikes a chord. The big difference now is that there’s no longer a subculture of ‘online junkies.’ From the time we wake up in the morning to the time we go to bed, we all want to be connected — and that includes when we get behind the wheel. So to this joke I would add:

• resent driving because it means going off the grid

At QNX, we’re working toward a seamless experience where people can enjoy the same connectivity whether they’re texting their spouse from the mall or checking traffic reports while driving down the highway. See what I mean:



For more information about the technology described in this video, visit the QNX website.
 

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Can HTML5 keep car infotainment on track?

Paul Leroux

True story: When a train on the Trans-Mongolian Railway crosses from Mongolia into China, it must stop and have all of its wheel assemblies replaced. Why? Because the track gauge (distance between the rails) is 1520 mm in Mongolia and 1435 mm in China. Oops!

The rail industry realized long ago that, unless it settled on a standard, costly scenarios like this would repeat themselves ad infinitum. As a result, some 60% of railways worldwide, including those in China, now use standard gauge, ensuring greater interoperability and efficiency.

The in-car infotainment market should take note. It has yet to embrace a standard that would allow in-car systems to interoperate seamlessly with smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices. Nor has it embraced a standard environment for creating in-car apps and user interfaces.

Of course, there are existing solutions for addressing these issues. But that's the problem: multiple solutions, and no accepted standard. And without one, how will cars and mobile devices ever leverage one another out of the box, without a lot of workarounds? And how will automakers ever tap into a (really) large developer community?

No standard means more market fragmentation — and more fragmentation means less efficiency, less interoperability, and less progress overall. Who wants that?

Is HTML5, which is already transforming app development in the desktop, server, and mobile worlds, the standard the car infotainment industry needs? That is one of the questions my colleague, Andy Gryc, will address in his seminar, HTML5 for automotive infotainment: What, why, and how?. The webinar happens tomorrow, November 15. I invite you to check it out.
 

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QNX and Freescale talk future of in-car infotainment

Paul Leroux

QNX and Freescale enjoy one of the longest technology partnerships in the field of automotive infotainment. The roots of their relationship reach back to 1999, when QNX became a founding member of MobileGT, an industry alliance formed by Motorola (Freescale's parent company) to drive the development of infotainment systems.

If you've read any of my blog posts on the QNX concept car (see here, here, and here), you've seen an example of how mixing QNX and Freescale technologies can yield some very cool results.

So it's no surprise that when Jennifer Hesse of Embedded Computing Design wanted to publish an article on the challenges of in-car infotainment, she approached both companies. The resulting interview, which features Andy Gryc of QNX and Paul Sykes of Freescale, runs the gamut — from mobile-device integration and multicore processors to graphical user interfaces and upgradeable architectures. You can read it here.
 

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Car Connectivity Consortium (CCC) MirrorLink meeting, Chicago, September 29, 2011

For those who aren't yet reset on "MirrorLink", it's the new term for what previously was called TerminalMode.  The name change is a definite improvement.  I informally polled people to ask them what they though when they first heard "Terminal Mode".  Basically the answers fell into two camps: either a telnet replacement or a disease you really don't want your doctor saying that you have. Neither sound like a real ringing endorsement!  MirrorLink as a term makes sense.  Good job CCC.

Here are some of my observations and notes from the CCC show in Chicago last week.

• MirrorLink will not be going away any time soon--there is enough industry momentum to keep it alive for a while.  Sounds like roughly 60% of the car makers and 60% of the mobile makers are behind it to some extent or another.
• QNX is very bullish on HTML5 as a replacement for MirrorLink-like features, but it doesn’t look like HTML5 is part of the future MirrorLink strategy at all.  Instead, they’re looking at HDMI or MDL—direct video from the mobile with a control channel.  This is a generic replacement for iPod out, and it's an approach that we've considered as well and will likely support, so this is a good alignment at least in direct video technology. Even though they don't see the wisdom of the HTML5 path yet (patience--they'll get there :-).
• OEMs don’t seem to realize how badly this will impact their revenue chain or are taking the "cross your fingers" approach.  Certainly many seemed to be focused solely on the value MirrorLink provides by enabling customers and building new markets.  I think it's somewhat Pollyanna-ish to not admit MirrorLink has the potential to completely decimate in-vehicle navigation uptake.  If I can bring my phone in for navigation for a half-way decent experience with a built-in screen, who's going to spend $3000 on a nav-only solution? 
• MirrorLink isn’t as focused as much on enabling third party apps (although they did talk about it), but more about mirroring custom-built phone apps into the car.  Everything that was demoed in the demo room breakout was a customized app that provided an integrated experience.  This is both bad and good.  Bad because it definitely reduces the short-term promise of opening up a huge third party ecosystem.  Good because I think it's the only reasonable way to go--there's really no other way OEMs can justify the liability of phone apps within the car, unless they can have some measure of control.
•  I still think that there's a significant amount of work they need to address safety concerns around driver distraction. MirrorLink the specification, and the general CCC communications contains "driver-safe" messaging.  However, my take is that the actual participation level people, especially on the mobile side seem to discount their accountability when you bring third party apps into the car, and nothing in the specification really makes it possible for an automotive outsider to make a car-safe app.  I highly doubt this approach will fly. The application level certification that is planned for a future MirrorLink 1.1 release seems almost a mandatory requirement before this issue can be put to bed.

Proposed app certification process

• Interestingly, almost every car company I talked to had a different take on how MirrorLink will impact their strategy—some see it as a low-end only play, but others see it as a high-end play.  There's still a lot of confusion as to where it slots into product lines.  I didn’t talk to anyone there who isn’t going to do it at all (not surprising given that the show was completely MirrorLink-focused), but some didn't seem to put a lot of weight behind it.  The perception I had was that some were doing it to "keep up with the Joneses."
• I give the CCC credit for realizing that MirrorLink has a lot of danger for the fragmentation whirlpool that has plagued Android releases and that makes Bluetooth interop the biggest nightmare for those who implement it and test it.  To that end, they're really trying to take this one head-on. It's still very early days to see if they will be successful, with the first MirrorLink 1.0.1 systems coming out in production.  (Alpine's aftermarket ICS-X8 earns that "first to market" distinction.) I hold out hope that CCC can keep MirrorLink interop from becoming a quagmire, but this is a bugger of a problem to fix in an area that tries to tie "slow-moving" car tech with the mobile space, so keep your eyes peeled...

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What’s next for the connected car?

It’s been almost three years since QNX Software Systems launched its connected car concept, and I thought it would be an interesting exercise to look at what has been accomplished in the automotive industry around the connected car and how some of the concepts are evolving. When the QNX CAR Application Platform was introduced, we provided a simple way to look at a connected car, using four “dimensions” of connectivity:

• Connected to portable consumer devices for brought-in media and handsfree communications
• Connected to the cloud for obvious reasons
• Connected within the car for sharing information and media between front and rear seats, between the center stack and the cluster, and for other similar functions
• Connected around the car for providing feedback to the driver about the environment surrounding the car, be it pedestrians, other cars, or vehicle to infrastructure communications

We’ve seen significant advances and evolutionary thinking on all fronts. Although QNX is not (and cannot be) at the forefront of all of these, our primary emphasis has been on cloud and consumer device connectivity. Nonetheless, it is interesting to look at each area.

Connected to consumer devices, connected to the cloud
Why lump these two together? There is not exactly a clear line between the two since consumer devices are often just extensions of the cloud. If my car connects to a smartphone which, in turn, draws information from the cloud, is there much point in creating a distinction between consumer device and cloud connections? Although it made sense to differentiate between cloud and consumer device connections when phones provided only handsfree calling and simple music playback, today the situation is quite different.

Device integration into the car has been a beehive of activity over the last few years. Smartphones, superphones, and tablets are providing entertainment, social networking, news, and access to a myriad of other content and applications to consumers anywhere, anytime. Automakers want to take advantage of many of these capabilities in a responsible, non-distracting way.

The primary issue here is how to marry the fast-paced consumer electronics world to the lifecycle of the car. At present, there are solutions at the opposite end of the spectrum: standardized Bluetooth interfaces that allow the car to control the smartphone; and screen replication technologies (iPod Out, VNC/Terminal Mode/Mirror Link) where the smartphone takes control and uses the car as a dumb display.

Neither of these scenarios takes full advantage of the combined processing power and resources of the car and the brought-in device. This, to me, is the next phase of car and cloud connectivity. How can the power of the cloud, brought-in devices, and the in-car systems be combined into a cooperative, distributed system that provides a better driver and passenger experience? (If the notion of a distributed system seems a bit of a stretch, consider the comments made by Audi Chairman Rupert Stadler at CES 2011.)

When looking for technologies that can bring the cloud, devices, and car together, you do not need to look any further than the web itself. The software technologies (HTML5, Javascript, AJAX, peer-to-peer protocols, tooling, etc.) that drive the web provide a common ground for building the future in car experience. These technologies are open, low cost, widely known and widely accessible. What are we waiting for?

Connected within the car
The integrated cockpit has emerged as a prevalent automotive design concept. It is now commonplace in higher-end vehicles to see seamless integration between center stack functions and the instrument cluster and driver information displays. For example, turn-by-turn directions, radio tuning, and song now playing are all available to the driver on the cluster, reducing the need to constantly glance over to the main display. One such example is the Audi cluster:

Connected around the car

Three years ago, systems in this category were already emerging, so there really wasn’t much of a crystal ball required here. Adaptive cruise control has become one of the most common features that illustrate how a car can connect to its surroundings. Adaptive cruise control detects the car’s surroundings (cars in front of you) and adjusts your speed accordingly. Other examples include pedestrian detection (offered in Volvo S60 and other models)automatic parking, lane departure warning, and blind spot detection/warning systems.

These Advanced Driver Assist Systems (ADAS) will become more common as cost reductions take place and the technology is provided in lower-end vehicles.

In contrast, vehicle-to-infrastructure communication that requires industry-wide collaboration is proceeding at a pace that you’d expect from an internationally standardized solution.

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