So I saw this competition advertised online, told Edwin about it... and we figured we'd give it a shot.
We won best 2D concept.
We won best 2D concept.
Icons
Our full entry was composited in imovie and contained steering wheel shots from our main interaction categories, Freeway, Parked and Innercity.
http://www.cgsociety.org/index.php/CGSFeatures/CGSFeatureSpecial/visteon_driving_innovation_challenge1
Our entry is a simple idea. It's all about relevance. It's about displaying information that is relevant to the situation, whether that's finding a great restaurant in town or driving home for Christmas on the Freeway. The idea is to remove anything that doesn't relate to the current situation, to empower the driver to have a truly efficient cockpit, where information and the road are the priorities.
The idea came from driving inner city. When driving at low speeds you don't need cruise control so it shouldn't be there. Simple idea. However, normally behind everything simple lies a long tail of complicated... :)
The idea is to keep everything tight, in the drivers field of view. To improve the connection with eyes on the road and help awareness of obstacles and other motorists, by ensuring that the right information is always seen.
We have tried to design a simple cockpit focusing on clean surfacing, which will support a simple UI rather than overpower it with dynamic shape.
The UI controls on the wheel change depending upon situation, which we have decided to divide based on speed. This gave us four situations. Parked, Crawl (parking), Inner city, and Freeway. Each situation has different priorities for example parked is more focused on finding your destination with the Navigation system and all situations have easy access to music control.
The steering wheel has two small touch screens and two trackpads to scroll and then tap for select. Scroll arrows and icons surrounding the track pads change depending on which menu is selected letting the driver keep their hands firmly on the wheel at all times.
The idea of relevance continues through the whole design. For example if the engine temperature is overheating, or the car is nearly out of gas, the smart dash will reflect that important information by changing and re-prioritising, ensuring that important information is always shown and communicated strongly to the driver. This style of central warning can be anything as simple as volume adjustments and other in car changes, all the way to showing hazards on the roads ahead or parking restrictions.
Thanks for looking,
Ed ^ Edwin
