I'm afraid not! I don't get to travel that far to nice places with lots of other interesting stuff that might distract me

You would have met some of my US colleagues on the stand - hopefully they did a passable imitation of knowing all about the stuff on show. I haven't had too much feedback from the show yet as they have just got back, and we are no longer at work over here! However, I do hear reports that some apparently knowledgeable people turned up mob-handed at the Visteon stand!!

So, my secret identity is safe for now!

I have a question... It's been stated that the content can be updated by emplode or emplode like software, but is the UI "skinable"??

Some of those screens look... how can I put this... a little too "Festive" for my tastes.

Okay, here's an animated GIF of the boot logo for the Visteon unit:

Tux Car

Warning, file is 1.2 megabytes. The timing of the animation speed is a little off depending on what browser you use to view it.

Tom: I put that in the FAQ-pics folder on riocar, hope you don't mind.

Can you make one like that for the empeg? That's pretty cool.

Thanks! Not sure if I could downsize that very well... the pixel rez and color depth of the empeg is so much lower...

An absolute cracker, shame my empeg's screen isn't colour..... Hold on, I'm in the wrong topic!

Love the license plate!!!

Nice driving

Love the license plate!!!

That animated logo has always been a popular demo point when we have been showing Camelot around. Nice work!

Nick

Does Camelot have a tuner?!!! And what would the likely cost be for an aftermarket model?

Some of those screens look... how can I put this... a little too "Festive" for my tastes.

That's not a production UI. You would get ill if you had to look at that colour scheme for too long!

Rob

The tuner wasn't fitted for the demo, but it would usually have one - along with satellite navigation and all the nice things you would expect of a highly integrated head unit.

Rob

That animated logo has always been a popular demo point when we have been showing Camelot around. Nice work!

Thanks!

I literally threw that together in a hurry for their initial prototypes last year. I didn't have a 3D rendering program so I downloaded a freeware one and had to learn to use it. I never got the reflections of the car body or the chrome right the way I wanted them. If I had it to do over again, I'd work more on it, get the animation smoother, do more effects, motion blurring, that sort of thing.

If we need one for production we can negotiate

Rob

If it's OEM in a specific car, I could do multiple ones if the company would give me a CAD file of the car...

Nah, too much overhead for managing multiple boot logos. Never mind.

Do it! you can't pass up an opportunity to make a logo that will be playing in thousands of cars around the country. You could even add in a single-frame subliminable message of your choice.

Pretty cool animation, Tony!

I imagine the prototype head unit looks nice in your car as well..

Thanks, Mark!

Heh, I wish I had one to mess with, but I'm not a Visteon beta tester unfortunately. The animation was created with merely a HxW pixel specification, and I e-mailed individual frames off to Cambridge. I didn't have anything to do with getting it actually installed onto the player.

In fact, I don't even know what the final format for it ended up being. I'm curious to know if the player is playing back an animated GIF, or if the frames were converted into a proprietary format. Anyone willing to tell me?

It's playing the animated GIF. Peter's very familiar with this sort of thing, as you might find if you did a google search

Hugo

At its simplest level this concept could work by mimicking the four way compass pad on a car player, Central, or receiver, translating touches in the top, right, left & bottom of the screen, and perhaps the centre of the screen for enter. More complicated gestures like tracing out a play symbol to make it play, or worse still a FFWD symbol to seek, then a pause symbol to stop it seeking would probably lead to more 'hands off the wheel' time than the deep & populated menus resulting from minimal controls. Also, the user would still have to look at the screen to position their finger in the right place.

Actually, I think one could do this without having the user looking at the screen, if you use true gesture recognition instead of mapping different screen section to certain commands. User would then just touch their way to the screen and do their gesture command, for which it doesn't matter if it's on the right half of the screen or on the left.

Directions would be mapped to a single finger tap + slide. Tap one finger and slide it right to ffwd. In a sense this creates a even more natural feeling, because the finger can go faster over the 2-dimensional sensor array or slower. So there's a direct relationship between action and command. Just like a dial does feel more natural for volume adjusting than constant speed (or even accelerated) up/down buttons. Now traditional touchscreen sensing technologies can only track motions of a single finger, but if it would feature one of these multitouch arrays we could map a two-fingerslide to a skip. Again, by moving two fingers slow and a just a bit to the right we skip one track. Fast and/or further to the right for skipping several tracks, while speed of motion determines how far the fingers have to slide to skip one track. The faster the shorter it is. This would enable you to 'accelerate' ...in a way. Two fingers up/down slide could be ... vol up/down.. Tap a single finger without sliding to play. Tap two pause....whatever.. you get the idea.

That being said, I still think knobs, dials, and buttons are the better solution for a car. Above gesture recognition does well for a HID ,allowing to map copy/paste, alt-f4 and the like shortcuts to gestures, but it doesn't provide the tactile feedback I'd like to have in a car situation.