Since the appearance of the world's first car with a radio in 1923, people's pursuit of in-car entertainment has not stopped. Every innovation in in-car entertainment is often followed by the advancement of electronic entertainment equipment technology.
Nowadays, the large screen has gradually become the mainstream configuration of new cars on the market, and the next direction of exploration of car companies is aimed at VR and AR. First, what is VR and AR? VR is an abbreviation for Virtual Reality, and AR is an abbreviation for Augmented Reality.
In layman's terms, VR is to reconstruct a completely virtual environment, wearing VR glasses can achieve full visual immersion, and AR is through transparent or translucent glasses or glass, the virtual picture is superimposed on the real environment. And what we are going to talk about today is the former.
01
Why do you have to do VR in the car?
At the end of last year, at the launch of THE ET5, it was also announced that it would cooperate with NOLO to create NIO VR Glasses to enrich the et5 passenger entertainment experience.
Coincidentally, the traditional car company Audi has just announced that Audi will launch a new car equipped with the MIB 3 infotainment system in June this year, whereby rear passengers can wear VR glasses to experience games, movies and other interactive content.
Obviously, in-car VR has become one of the highlights of car companies' pursuit of differentiated competition to improve user experience, so why is it VR?
In the long journey, the tediousness of the boat and car and the small space in the car create demand for the car's entertainment system, from radio to CD player, from satellite TV to streaming, behind which is the upgrade of the communication form from sound to image, and VR further creates a 3D virtual space on the basis of 2D images. It provides a more unique immersive experience, allowing passengers to be completely sensory isolated from the clutter of roads, and if done well, it can greatly alleviate the fatigue and fatigue of long journeys.
02
How is the headset positioned in the car?
The vast majority of VR devices were originally developed for indoor use, and now moving them into the car will face an important problem - how to solve the drift of the headset handle positioning caused by the car during travel.
To know how to solve the problem of positional drift on the go, you may wish to first understand why VR headsets need to be positioned. In order to reduce the vertigo caused by using VR, we need the picture in the VR headset to really move according to the movement of our head like in the real world.
Therefore, we need to accurately capture the movement of our heads. In order to be able to meet more realistic interactions, it is often necessary to capture our hand movements at the same time, which has also spawned the headset and handle positioning technology in VR.
At present, there are two more mainstream positioning methods on the market, the first is the Outside-In positioning technology represented by the Lighthouse used by HTC VIVE.
HTC's Lighthouse relies on two diagonal laser emitters to emit laser beams to ensure that there are virtually no occluded parts of the space. Each laser emitter has a rotating motor, and the rotating motor drives the emitting element to emit a V-shaped laser to the positioning space to scan the positioning space.
There are more than 70 light sensors on the HTC VIVE series headset and handle, and the light sensor calculates the exact position of the sensor position relative to the laser emitter by calculating the time it takes to receive the laser, and multiple light sensors can detect the position and direction of the headset.
Outside-In positioning technology has the advantages of high positioning accuracy, distributed processing, and almost no delay, no fear of obstruction, even in the car, the handle can still be captured on the back of the seat or under the seat. It can be said that laser positioning technology has achieved high-precision and high-response speed positioning while avoiding the disadvantages of high complexity, high equipment cost, slow operation speed, and easy to be affected by natural light based on image processing technology.
The Inside-Out positioning technology used by Oculus Quset 2 uses SLAM real-time positioning and map construction technology based on computer vision, using computer vision and customized algorithms to generate a real-time 3D map of the surrounding environment, and then calculate the user's position in the map, and then convert it into a VR screen.
Inside-Out positioning technology does not require additional tracking base stations, the cost is lower, but it is precisely because of the limitation of the headset camera angle, Inside-Out positioning technology can not locate the area that the camera can not cover, such as the back, at the same time in multiple devices to locate each other is not as good as Outside-In.
It is reported that the NIO VR Glasses on the WEILAI ET5 adopt the Inside-Out method to achieve sub-millimeter-level spatial positioning with 6 degrees of freedom.
From the perspective of implementation effect and implementation difficulty, Outside-In positioning technology is undoubtedly more suitable for use in the car, but it is also necessary to make the use area planning of the VR function from the beginning of vehicle development, arrange the transmitter and line, do a good job of computing power distribution, and so on. This will undoubtedly increase the cost of mass production, which is too risky when it is not clear whether consumers are willing to pay for the feature.
Inside-Out positioning technology mass production cost is low, but the use of the inside of the car for the algorithm puts forward higher requirements, the need for the machine to be able to distinguish the range of scenery inside the car and outside the car, but also need to correct the gyroscope error caused by the movement of the vehicle, if the above problems can be solved, then the VR using the Inside-Out positioning method can be loaded on more cars as an optional function.
03
Can sex be?
If you want to play the AAA level masterpiece in car VR, in addition to solving the problem of headset positioning, another important hardware basis is the performance of the cockpit chip.
In a cockpit entertainment system, the chip is the brain of the entire system, and the computing power determines the upper limit of its responsiveness and interactive experience. The same is true for VR, and the level of chip image rendering ability will directly affect the display effect and response speed.
Compared with mobile phones, cars are conditionally equipped with stronger computing equipment and better audio, and after the completion of the new four modernizations, the substantial improvement in the performance of cockpit chips has brought possibilities for more complex image rendering.
Taking the current high-end cockpit chip Qualcomm 8155 as an example, the GPU uses Adreno 640, the frequency is more than 100 MHz higher than the Snapdragon 855 chip on the mobile phone, which is close to the Snapdragon 855+, but it is still stretched to cope with the VR 4K level resolution and 120 Hz refresh rate demand, and can only carry out some lightweight entertainment.
At present, the most powerful cockpit chip is Tesla MCU3, MCU 3 central control platform using 12 nm Zen+/Navi 23 composed of 4-core AMD Ryzen chip, with 8 GB of RAM, the performance is flat the current mainstream game console, can fully support the VR headset 3A level of large-scale game performance requirements.
04
What should I do if I get more motion sickness?
There are many consumers who are worried about whether wearing VR glasses while sitting in the car will aggravate the situation of motion sickness. We get motion sickness because when we get in the car, we feel the movement of the body, but the field of vision is confined to the car, deceiving our brains into telling us that we are not moving. These two unequal inputs of information confuse the brain, which induces motion sickness.
That said, whether you feel motion sickness or not depends mainly on whether your physical sensations and visual sensations are consistent. If the movement of the vehicle can be synchronized to the VR virtual space through VR technology to match what the eye sees and the actual perception of the body, it can alleviate motion sickness to a certain extent.
To accomplish this, all that needs to be done is to match virtual content with data such as speed and steering, as early as the CES International Consumer Electronics Show in 2019, automaker Audi and VR brand Holoride jointly created a VR experience project called "Avengers: Rocket Rescue".
The experience is unique in that every vehicle action of the Holoride-modified Audi e-tron will be mapped in real time in a virtual spaceship in the VR scene, the car accelerates, the spacecraft accelerates, the car turns left, and the spacecraft also bypasses obstacles, thereby reducing the motion sickness that can occur when wearing VR.
05
The end point of VR is the third space
Problems such as head display positioning and computing power performance are stumbling blocks on the road to the development of current vehicle VR, but indoor VR, which has long solved these two problems, still has a long way to go in popularity. Now you only need to spend more than 2,000 yuan to buy an Oculus Quest 2 that has good display, positioning accuracy, and scalability, so why is VR still a niche toy for geeks?
The problem may lie in the content, since the birth of VR, there have been drawing software such as Tilt Brush that breaks the traditional experience, and there have also been game masterpieces such as Beat Saber and Half-Life Alyx, but most of the apps still copy the experience of the flat screen era, which is nothing more than making the interface larger and more three-dimensional.
The advantage of the screen over paper is that it can infinitely expand the two-dimensional space, and the biggest advantage of VR over the flat screen is that it can expand the three-dimensional space infinitely.
With the deepening of the degree of intelligence of the car, the car is no longer a simple means of transportation, but gradually transformed into a third space of life. At present, the development direction of the smart cockpit has slowly shifted from the understanding of making the screen bigger and then transplanting several mobile phone applications to thinking about the car as a space.
Jiang Weizhong, deputy general manager of the product planning department of Xiaopeng Automobile, said frankly that in fact, there is no consensus in the industry on the ultimate form of intelligent vehicles, but the transformation of the car cockpit to the intelligent third space is an inevitable trend.
Based on today's technology, we can't yet accurately define the cars of the future, but it's safe to say that the cars that come to life on autopilot will be completely different new cars. Mature autonomous driving will liberate the attention of drivers and passengers, and at that time, the car cockpit will enter the era of the third space in the true sense of the word with its movable properties.
Due to the limited width of the road, we can't infinitely enlarge the space of the car cockpit, and if we want to tap the value of the car cockpit's mobile space as much as possible, VR provides us with a good solution. In the VR virtual space, the car is not only a tool for communication, but also a moving office, a mobile cinema, a mobile chess and card room, and the physical space of the car cockpit will be under the blessing of VR, obtain unlimited space expansion, and switch at will.
Pulling the eye back to the present, in the next time, there may be a large number of vr-equipped cars on the market, but from the current car company publicity, it seems that the car company has not yet seen a very accurate plan for the car VR function, but more like a marketing gimmick. Car companies should think about how to really take advantage of the unlimited expansion of virtual space by VR devices, rather than seeing it as a larger screen.
Author: Kai Xiang
Edit: June 3
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