GENIVI All Members meeting - 2012-04-26
Philipp Hoschka and Dave Raggett were invited to attend the session on HTML5 at the 6th GENIVI All Member Meeting Conference in Paris. GENIVI is a non-profit industry alliance with the goal of establishing broad adoption of an open source development platform for in vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems. HTML5 and the Web provide many benefits for networked infotainment systems.
Presentations:
Participants at the HTML5 session described their interests. In particular, the need to define open standards for automotive Web APIs. There is likely to be a core set of APIs that every car would support, and a set of optional APIs whose support would vary from car to car. Some concerns were raised about the performance of current HTML5 implementations, e.g. when using touch events to move a virtual slider implemented with the HTML5 canvas, where latency in responsiveness impairs the user experience. The success of ACID2 for CSS suggests the value of carefully designed test cases to focus attention on improving browser implementations in respect to both performance and consistency of support for HTML5 and its associated APIs.
To start with, it is likely that most automakers would only permit a limited set of carefully vetted applications. As experience is gained, this is expected to open up, and along with it, the need to address the challenges of driver distraction for Web applications running in the car. The browser/web run-time would need to respond to changes in the context, and to impose suitable adaptations on applications, including management of notifications to minimize cognitive load.
The next step will be to establish formal liaisons between W3C and GENIVI, to see how we can work together on the planned W3C workshop and to initiate standards work on automotive Web APIs.
- see the GENIVI web site