Posted on July 31, 2014 at. July 31, 2014 by Drea Fekety

Last week, we went on a day-trip to Munich to visit some of the Stuttgart HCI Lab’s colleagues and collaborators. We first visited the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich, but I will describe that visit in a different post. During the second half of the day, we went to the center for BMW Group’s Research and Technology (also in Munich).

The picture above was the only picture I could take during our visit to this facility (for obvious reasons). Even then, it was raining all day long so when we arrived we were absolutely soaked.

While we were there we met Nora Broy, who guided us through her department and showed us some projects currently in development (many of which were organized by Master’s students, which I thought was cool). Nora explained that many of the research efforts headed by the BMW R&D team are trying to establish what will be needed and/or popular in consumer vehicles 10 or 20 years in the future.

Much of the group’s research involved 3-dimensional displays, eye-tracking, navigation through menus (e.g., center console cluster displays), or some combination of these three things.

One piece of cool tech we saw was a “mirror box” which basically reflects parts of a 2-dimensional display in such a way that they appear 3-dimensional. We were also shown a few demonstrations of how a user can navigate through a menu by looking at areas of a display/interface. Overall, I was shown some great things, and I look forward to possibly seeing some of these things in future automobiles!