i3 - January/February 2020 - 34

"What people
want to do inside
the car will drive
how the interior
will be structured,
and it will enable
experiences
based on that."

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020

car outfitted with eight RGB-IR cameras that,
when in production, will be smaller than a cell
phone camera.
Eyeris has worked with automakers Honda,
Jaguar Land Rover, Mitsubishi and Toyota, and
with auto industry Tier 1 suppliers including
Bosch. Two more partners will be revealed at
CES 2020, and the first production vehicles with
Eyeris' technology built in will roll off assembly
lines starting in 2022, Alaoui says.

DESIRE MOTIVATES CHOICE

From steering wheels to seats, car interiors have
remained essentially unchanged along with the use case of a
driver and passenger(s) or cargo. Looking ahead, "there's a paradigm shift," says Alexander van Laack, director of the "cockpit of
the future" platform at Faurecia North America, based in Auburn
Hills, MI. "What people want to do inside the car will drive how
the interior will be structured, and it will enable experiences based
on that."
So, when cars are entirely self-driving, van Laack suggests,
the interior could be turned into a complete gaming console,
where air conditioning, seating vibrations and fragrance infusion all become part of the game environment and stimulate
perceptions. Or, because humans are "multimodal," stimulating senses may turn the interior into a sort of wellness spa, he
says. Faurecia demonstrated this at CES 2019 using seat vibrations combined with music, and the company is also highlighting this at CES 2020.
Seats are evolving, too. At CES 2019, the company showed
how they can move, pivot and recline in novel ways while
remaining safe, with seatbelts affixed to the seat structure and
integrated motors that bring a person upright in the event of an
impending collision.
I T I S I N N O VAT I O N

Top: Courtesy of Faurecia. Right: Courtesy of Byton (2)

attention to the car with better in-cabin technology
- not favoring a brought-in device - when they're
no longer piloting, Kolodge maintains. Displays stay
relevant in future car interiors, but their roles
change, she says. Instead of being dedicated to one
context, they'll enable personalization via interchangeable purposes, she explains.
"Maybe you can't make your car a living room
on wheels yet, but you can still repurpose a lot of
the smart home experience within, say, a semiautonomous vehicle," says James Hodgson, principal
analyst at ABI Research in Wellingborough, U.K. This
accounts for the emergence of digital assistants like
Amazon Alexa and Google Now in autos, he says.
Going forward, in-cabin cameras and radars installed
for driver and passenger monitoring systems will be
leveraged for "emotional intelligence," too, enabling
the car to proactively respond to the user's mood by
adjusting lighting or the music that's
playing. He also foresees biometric technology allowing the car to identify
everyone inside it, giving each person
access to his or her own content, cloudbased services or settings.
At CES 2020 Hodgson anticipates
more focus on this technology in cars.
"The automotive industry is scrambling to show things of value in the
short and medium term rather than
moonshot ideas," he declares.
Indeed, automotive emotion recognition through artificial intelligence (AI)
is "literally the premise on which we
developed our technology starting in
2014," says Modar Alaoui, founder and CEO of Eyeris,
based in Palo Alto, CA. Employing multiple in-cabin
cameras and an AI chip from various hardware partners, the company's technology features 10 computer
vision neural networks running in parallel to analyze
human behavior - from upper body, face and activity
- in relation to objects and surfaces in real time,
Alaoui explains. The addition of object recognition
and surface classification neural networks to Eyeris's
existing portfolio of human behavior understanding
algorithms results is "in-vehicle, scene-understanding
AI" that enables the car to adapt to what's going on
inside it, he says. This is a "renaissance of the in-cabin
space, which never before generated any type of meaningful data that could optimize safety and enhance
comfort and convenience."
Eyeris announced its human behavior understanding technology at CES 2018 and recently introduced the first fully integrated system that integrates
combination RGB-IR cameras. At CES 2020 it will
demonstrate its system in a Tesla Model S concept

i3 - January/February 2020

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