In-Car Infotainment
In-car infotainment and networking  Matthias Heyde/ Fraunhofer FOKUS

In-car infotainment 

Solutions for easy to deploy and high-performance HMIs

The FOKUS platform for in-car infotainment and assistant system HMIs leverages a Java JVM and the performance of a native HTML engine. The platforms concept aims on hardware and OS-independence.

HTML5 based HMI: HTML5 can help automakers to deliver what their customers want in their in-vehicle infotainment systems at reasonable cost today and tomorrow. In that way, the content and services that are used on devices like smart phones and tablets can now be conveniently consumed using in-vehicle-infotainment systems. HTML5 is a non-proprietary and widely adopted standard that has already been proved in a wide range of implementations.

Architectural Approach: Scalable and distributed- services, once deployed, are available to various clients inside and outside the car. Presentation can be achieved based on one machine and several displays or with completely different stations. As a result, an application deployed to the platform becomes a distributed system, in which the user interfaces of an application running on one device are rendered on other devices (thin clients, smart phones, external monitors). The platform creates a sandboxed environment for the hosted applications ensuring the isolations of vital system functions.

Applications: The Platform aims on hosting infotainment applications like media streaming, gaming, social and informative applications on the one hand. On the other hand, since Car-2-X (C2X) Communication is coming up, C2X applications can also be hosted on the platform. The latter class of applications require a deeper integration in the system e.g. to be able to access the instrument cluster of the car.