my name is Holger Banski and I'm a project manager / senior research engineer in the user interaction technology group at the Robert Bosch Research and Technology Center in Palo Alto, California.

Since BOSCH is the largest automotive supplier in the world, my main research area is focused on the automotive sector. Over the last years more and more different input and output technologies found their way into cars. Input technologies such as speech-recognition, gesture control, gaze control and output technologies such as text-to-speech are already brought into products or will be in the near future. Another trend that could be observed in the last years is to base user interfaces in cars on HTML5, allowing more flexible human machine interfaces and easier updates.

I personally manage a project that connects smart devices (iOS and Android) to the head unit of vehicles, based on standard web technologies (http/https, HTML, CSS, JavaScript). In the future, automotive head units will provide HTML5 compliant browsers and most likely permanent internet access. In combination with the instrument cluster, head-up-displays, passenger displays and the traditional head unit, cars will support a wide variety of output displays as well as vocal and haptic input and output solutions. Additionally both, drivers and passengers will bring several mobile devices into the car that can be connected as well.

A HTML5 based framework that supports easy connectivity among those modalities and devices is highly desired, to utilize all those different technologies. I would be happy to attend the W3C Workshop on Rich Multimodal Application Development to get the newest updates on leveraging HTML5 and the W3C Multimodal Architecture and bring my experience and ideas into the discussion.