Being able to integrate consumer electronics (CE) devices into the automobile is an increasingly important goal. In this paper, we focus on the HMI (human machine interaction) aspects of consumer electronics in the car. We describe the requirements concerning HMI integration of consumer electronics and offer several possible solutions.
One of the requirements is minimal driver distraction. A desired property in this context concerns the mental model that the user builds of the service that is to be operated: ideally, this model (i.e., appearance and interaction logic) need not change when integrating the service into the automobile, even though the operating elements differ considerably (e.g., touch screen vs. iDrive commander).
A further requirement is posed by the dynamic nature of CE services: often, they are not known at design/deploy time of the HMI software of the automobile. In this situation, the automobile's HMI system must dynamically generate an appropriate user interface for the CE service and integrate it into the existing overall HMI system.
The approaches described in this paper have been implemented and address these challenges.