By John Craig, Intermap technologies

Digital maps are now a part of many people’s daily lives, and their uses and functionality are still evolving rapidly. In early navigation systems they were integrated into the dash by the car manufacturer, and later brought into vehicles via Personal Navigation Devices (PND). These maps evolved particularly fast on the PND side for some years, but the future target hardware of choice is no longer a dedicated navigation device like a PND – it is a phone. Phones are increasingly being brought into cars to serve as the prime navigation device, with relatively recent additions to this bandwagon being phones from Apple and Google. Compared to in-dash navigation systems, phones are inherently connected, and can offer navigation that is not only cost-efficient, but often better – leveraging a highly competitive market that stimulates innovation, rapid software development cycles, and increasing volumes of user data to improve the services. Cost-efficient is perhaps even understating the case, with both server-based offboard and device-based onboard (i.e. like the in-dash systems) navigation now available ‘free’ from Google and Nokia respectively.

However, in-dash navigation systems are still going strong today and are generating margin and significant revenues. They are ‘automotive-standard’ and fully integrated for convenience and safety – consumer devices that fly around the car interior in the event of an accident should be avoided. Solutions are also emerging whereby nomadic PND devices are more deeply integrated into the car from hardware and software perspectives, thus capitalising on consumer feature development speed and richness, augmented by the integrity of proper automotive design.

In-dash navigation systems and their associated maps - particularly those integrated during production - are generally developed according to automotive requirements, timeframes, and processes. This can mean such solutions are overtaken by their consumer equivalents during their complex development process, so that they may appear outdated when launched into the market. By comparison phone evolution is like the Wild West, and phones are leading map use in a somewhat different direction, towards social interaction, rich visuals where ‘driver distraction’ is not an issue, personalisation using placemarks and other means, and features that are simply fun. Ongoing competition in high-end smartphones will advance this development at a higher pace, as the boundaries of current applications are rolled back with the launch of the latest and greatest phone applications.

Does this mean that in future the automotive industry and the phone industry will require different types of maps, in terms of their precision, richness, and design? The author will argue that in the future two different types of maps will emerge - Maps for people will be presented with a user interface designed to be both visual and entertaining, while maps for cars, will be precise but lack visual elements since these "maps" will be used only for machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. In other words, there will be perception maps, and reality maps.

Maps for Cars will play a crucial role in providing vehicles with the next generation of advanced applications. These will appear in our vehicles in the next 2-5 years and make cars both safer and more fuel-efficient. Safety (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, or ADAS) applications will include car headlights that automatically optimise illumination on upcoming roads, advice on when not to overtake due to road topology, and warnings when approaching bends too quickly – all using 3-Dimensional map data to comprehend the road ahead. In the burgeoning energy management field, road slope will be incorporated into systems to provide the most economic route, to change gears in anticipation of slope changes, and to accurately predict how far electric and hybrid electric vehicles will travel before needing a recharge. These, and other emerging applications based on 3D maps, will be just as exciting and innovative as those from the phone world.

Continued...