The Connected Car Consortium has begun developing a test case framework for certifying MirrorLink applications for the car, which should be finalized in October, executives said this week.
The idea is to enable an ecosystem of phones, cars, or head units, and applications that can work together, essentially porting the application to the car. The technology is 14 months old, and the CCC hopes that MirrorLink will be a standard feature on cars by 2014, Mika Rytkonen, the CCC's chairman, said in an interview.
"It's quite obvious that consumers today, especially Generation Y, want to connect smartphones to cars," Rytkonen said.
Several OEMs, including Sony and Alpine, sell MirrorLink head units, while the Toyota Scion iQ is also MirrorLink enabled, executives said. Nokia's 701 is also MirrorLink-enabled. But there aren't any apps.
Right now, the 56-member group (including carmakers like Fiat, General Motors, Reanult, Volkswagen, Ford, Toyota, and Honda; plus major phone makers like HTC, Samsung, and Nokia, save Apple) is developing software use cases to ensure that the third-party applications can function properly within a MirrorLink environment, and the car, executives said.
Each application can operate in either one of two states: restricted or unrestricted mode, said Alfred Tom, a researcher at General Motors and the chairman of the ecosystem work group at the CCC. Unrestricted mode allows full access to the app's functionality, while restricted mode permits the driver and passenger only limited access to the app's features. Those that can't be used are grayed out, Tom said.
A unified API would allow app developers to create a single application for a large number of cars, Tom said.
The application development framework that the CCC members are developing would use the car to communicate to the phone that it was in motion, and to shift into restricted mode. Exactly when this would happen - choices include whether to shift to restricted mode at speeds over 5 mph, for example - would be up to the OEM, Tom said.
In part, that's because the automakers have to design for different regulatory frameworks. "There's a lot of talk in political circles, including agencies that want to ban anything that communicates from happening in the car," Tom said. He was referring to proposed Department of Transportation guidelines that would ban virtually all in-car communications by a driver.
"Consumers, if they think they can get away with it, are going to go for it," Tom added. "We first saw this with speeding, and it also applies to test messages. What we're trying to do is establish a process and guidelines that are satisfactory to regulators."
Under the guidelines, each developer would submit his app for certification, to determine that the app wasn't a "bad actor." In the car context, that could include distracting games, Tom said.
Once the certification was approved, it would be attached to the binary code of the app. The phone and head unit would then need to discover that digital certificate before the app could be played, Tom said. Although MirrorLink hasn't yet approved any apps, Tom identified Pandora as an app that had already successfully integrated with several head units and cars.
Tom said he didn't expect developers would need to create separate versions of the app for cars.
Speech or voice recognition will be part of the test cases, Tom said, but the OEM alliance will have to figure out a number of issues, such as which device will serve as the voice input, as well as noise isues in the car, he said.
For more, check out the MirrorLink demonstration video below:
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