Compositing User Interfaces in Partitioned In-Vehicle Infotainment

Abstract

Automotive information and entertainment systems have become an integral part of a car's humanmachine interface and already affect a prospective customer's purchase decision. In-Vehicle Infotainment systems combine an increasing number of software-based functionalities of varying importance and purpose on a shared hardware platform. This led to integrated modular architectures to achieve temporal isolation of different classes of applications, developed independently by multiple suppliers. Despite this partitioning on the software level, the user interface has to provide all functionality in a uniform way, blended into the manufacturer's superordinate usage concept. Furthermore, allocation and presentation of graphical content has to respect the car's operating state along with the user's preferences and system interaction. In the following, an approach is presented that enables the integration of segregated and independently rendered graphics into a uniform graphical user interface, while considering a multi-display environment and flexible allocation of different views. Relevant requirements, a prospective architecture, and a prototypical implementation are presented to foster the provisioning of the required computational and graphical power to enable future In-Vehicle Infotainment systems.