VW's next-gen infotainment system, maybe

By Wayne Cunningham on 25 May 2009

Volkswagen's Silicon Valley boffins have come up with a prototype of what might be the company's next-generation integrated entertainment and information system.

Located far from corporate headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany, the engineers at Volkswagen's Electronic Research Laboratory (ERL) take advantage of their proximity to high-tech companies, such as Apple, Intel and Google, to develop new infotainment systems and interfaces for VW cars. We got a look at ERL's latest work, a system developed with Intel called the Global Open Research Infotainment Architecture, or GLORIA.

Home is where the main menu is

ERL senior engineer Eric Jensen walked us through the latest interface built on GLORIA. The test system he showed us relied on a touchscreen for all input, although a production system might use some hard buttons on the edges of the screen. The system we saw was under heavy development and would probably find its way into a production car in three years, at the earliest.

The home screen for VW's development infotainment system has large buttons for navigation, music and photos. It also has a button for widgets, which would bring up third-party applications loaded on by the owner. At this development stage, the system only had applications for navigation and music, but Jensen explained that it could serve as a platform for third-party developers to build useful widgets in a model similar to how the iPhone and iPod Touch work.

(Credit: CNET)

Topics: vw, volkswagen, gps, sat nav, cd, mp3, erl, gloria, open source, sat nav, gesture, multitouch

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