GM gets interactive with Windows of Opportunity passenger entertainment
Researchers and students from a design college in Israel have developed an interactive program designed to revolutionise back-seat travel in future General Motors vehicles.
Similar to Toyota’s Window to the World concept revealed last July, the Windows of Opportunity (WOO) system is designed to “replace squirminess and snoozing with interactive scribbling, sweeping and pinching”.
GM’s research and development team challenged Bezalel Academy for Art and Design’s Future Lab to develop a concept that helped back-seat passengers – especially children – enjoy a richer experience while on the road.
GM told the Future Lab team it had “no immediate plans” to put WOO into its production cars, giving them freedom to design almost anything their imaginations could dream up.
The team developed four unique apps:
- Otto, an animated character that responds to real-time vehicle performance and weather conditions and interacts with the scenery
- Foofu, a drawing program that lets passengers get artistic with their fingertips
- Spindow, an app that lets passengers swap their view for other real-time windows from around the world; and
- Pond, a file-sharing app that can stream music between cars, download favourite songs and share messages between road users.
GM says interactive windows for production vehicles would likely use electronically charged ‘smart glass’ technology, which is capable of various states of translucency, but gave no indication of when we could see WOO in showrooms.
The days of calling ‘shotgun’ could be numbered…
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