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Volvo Integrating iPhone in Upcoming Cars

posted by janrinok on Wednesday March 05 2014, @04:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the Volvo-durch-iPhone dept.

bopal writes:

"The German news site heise.de writes [German language only] that soon you can interact with your iPhone from the built-in touchscreen of their cars. The idea is shown in this youtube.com video."

The press release speaks of the advantages (in sales-speak) of integrating a large portrait-oriented touch screen with an advanced voice control system like Siri.

This comes at a time, where Switzerland is contemplating of moving against large built-in screens in cars, as they are distracting for the driver http://readzer.com/."

 
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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Urlax on Wednesday March 05 2014, @11:33AM

    by Urlax (3027) on Wednesday March 05 2014, @11:33AM (#11276)

    It works over lightning, which supports hdmi out.

    so this is probably a hdmi LCD screen with USB touchscreen. the wheel control button(s) is probably also just a USB HID device.

    should be possible to create an adapter for each and every standard PC. however, the lightning connection is proprietary, and streams some kind of MPEG video:
    https://www.panic.com/blog/the-lightning-digital-a v-adapter-surprise/ [panic.com]

    so if we want to hook up an Android device, rPI, laptop or desktop, you need to rip out the apple adapter and find the bare video signal.

    so the idea is fantastic, up to date maps, contact sync, voice control, app store it will be a while before this works with android/linux. it may even be prohibited by the apple agreement. (slapping a made for iPhone/iPad logo forbids them of creating an hdmi(mhl)->lightning adapter)

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  • (Score: 2) by mojo chan on Wednesday March 05 2014, @01:41PM

    by mojo chan (266) on Wednesday March 05 2014, @01:41PM (#11315)

    It works over lightning, which supports hdmi out.

    Actually it doesn't. The HDMI adapter is an AirPlay receiver with HDMI output, as you alluded to. It probably doesn't matter much on a small car screen but on a TV you can see the compression artefacts clearly. Actually maybe it does matter in a car if there is additional latency.

    Toyota's head units support MirrorLink, which is based on the VNC protocol so works over both wired and wireless connections. Quite a few Android devices support it. My guess is that Apple didn't want to use it because of both a desire for lock-in and because it supports multiple resolutions. Apple prefer to have fixed resolutions and iOS would need major changes to support arbitrary ones. Toyota also have HDMI input which can be used with an MHI adapter, which gives true uncompressed digital video but of course doesn't support touch input.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)