CES 2013: QNX Car Platform 2.0 is Ready to Take Over a Vehicle Near You

Although QNX is mostly known for building things such as the Blackberry 10 and Playbook operating systems, they have also been hard at work building embedded systems for cars for quite some time. At CES 2013, this company was demoing its new Car Platform 2.0 in a Bentley Continental GT, which featured many state-of-the-art features that will be available in cars in the foreseeable future.

The Car Platform 2.0 features Texas Instruments’ DLP technology nicely packed into a 1080p display. This technology allows the device to track finger movement before it makes contact with the screen, and also offers various actions based on the mode that it’s in. Additionally, the display has a one-meter radius curvature, which QNX says makes the screen easier to touch, even in the corners.

QNX’s car platform is one of the first systems to utilize TI’s OMAP 5 processor, which, for a majority of the year, has been waiting for a product to make use of it. Moreover, this system comes complete with full 4G LTE capability, giving the Car Platform 2.0 reliable coverage, even on the go.

Besides the program’s standard features such as navigation, climate control, and voice calls, QNX’s system also supports wide-bandwidth, high-resolution video calling. In the test vehicle at CES, dual cameras allowed both the driver and passenger to be a part of video conferences, including stereo sound and full duplex calling. As an added safety feature, the video calling feature only works when the car is in park, switching immediately over to voice calling when the car is shifted into another gear.

If that didn’t already seem like enough, the QNX Car Platform 2.0 also can be controlled with a smartphone. The company has created a cross-platform HTML 5 app that allows users to control functions though a secure connection between the phone and the car. These functions include things such as opening and closing windows, starting the car, unlocking it, and monitoring vehicle diagnostics.

Furthermore, QNX included a version of the Blackberry 10′s browser in the demo software in the Bentley Continental GT at CES. This allows the driver or passenger to browse the web on the system’s 17-inch, 1080p screen from inside of the car. But wait, there’s more – the system is also completely voice operated, allowing the driver to control the system without distracting themselves from the road or taking their hands off of the wheel.

The Car Platform 2.0 is currently being shipped to car manufacturers now, but it will take a while before cars begin running the software in showrooms. In addition, the over the top features seen in the Bentley Continental GT most likely won’t be seen in most commercial vehicles due to the fact that the manufacturers can customize the features of this system used in their vehicles. However, the Car Platform 2.0 provides an exciting look into the systems of cars down the line and a mind-blowing preview into the passenger-vehicular interaction that will be occurring in the future.