At the CES 2020 in North America a while ago, many exhibitors were discussing. Participating in CES for many years has gradually lost its “freshness”. After all, the rapid progress of science and technology is not enough to support each year. Can display “black technology”, so the content of each booth is slightly “pale”, it is difficult to trigger people’s excitement.
So “Sony made cars” became the biggest highlight of this CES. When Sony put a concept car Vision-S on its platform, the frequent shutter sounds and the number of people queuing experience were enough to explain its amazingness. degree. But in fact, through the heated discussion of “Sony made cars”, we can see that people are tired of the “unexpected” display, and they want to see “unexpected” surprises.
However, Sony does not intend to enter the car manufacturing industry. Instead, it will cooperate with third-party companies to integrate its own imaging and sensing, AI, communication, and cloud computing technologies into this Vision-S to demonstrate. Sony’s technology reserves in the field of autonomous driving.
In other words, Sony did not intend to mass-produce cars for sale to consumers. Instead, it used this highly completed concept car to show its technological strength to major car companies in order to gain huge commercial value. After all, in the future, no matter how to achieve autonomous driving, vision sensors are indispensable, and Sony CMOS is undoubtedly the industry-leading level.
Although the arrival of true L4 (L5) fully autonomous driving may take a long time, its huge market potential will certainly mean that companies in other industries are hopingAmong them is a share, such as Bose, a company focused on audio.
Most people learn about the brand through headphones and portable audio, and Bose is indeed a company focused on audio, but in fact they have been involved in the automotive industry for a long time. In the 1980s, car music entertainment systems had just emerged, and Bose began to work directly with car companies from “rear-mounted car audio.” Due to the abandonment of the “uncontrollable final quality” after-installation business, instead of cooperating only with OEM factories and the good quality of the audio itself, Bose car audio has received a lot of praise in the US market.
In fact, although car audio is more and more noticed by users, it is only a set of entertainment equipment after all. The added value of the car varies from person to person and is not a critical consideration. So for Bose, simply improving the sound effect will not help them expand the influence of the automotive industry.
The reason why Bose audio is considered by the automotive industry is that “the volume can be compact under the premise of ensuring the sound quality.” Perhaps the advantage of small size at first is only to ensure that the car audio does not sacrifice power and sound quality, but With the development of technology, another advantage gradually emerges, which is to be able to arbitrarily arrange the number and location of sounds in the limited space of the car to achieve various desired effects.
For example, several audio systems shown at this CES, 5.1 surround sound system in Porsche Taycan, Corvette 2020 StingrayThe Zhenzhen series, the Personal Plus audio system on the Nissan JUKE, and the advanced audio system on the Renault Clio, all use small and lightweight speakers with advanced algorithms to provide features such as adjusting the sound field size and automatically adjusting the Adjust the volume, and the headrest surround sound provides a wide sound field.
These technologies used in audio systems can create many different effects to meet the entertainment needs of different user groups, but obviously Bose wants to use his own audio system technology to achieve more functions.
For example, the Bose Aware sound signal guidance technology demonstrated this time can pass information such as navigation tips and ADAS warnings to the driver. At first glance, it may seem that there is no difference from the existing “sound reminder”, but in fact Bose uses its wide and accurate sound field of the sound system to give the sound a sense of direction and turn the process of “sound information-understanding semantics” into “sound Information-intuitive perception. ”
For example, in the navigation process, when people hear the voice reminder at a fork in a road, they often look at the screen to confirm that they want to turn to that road. In the Bose system, the navigation voice will come from different directions, even if It was accidentally not heard clearly, but the directional sound will make the driver have a very natural impression to get accurate turn instructions.
Especially for ADAS warning information, although there have been “directional” warning reminders in the past, the resolution achieved by using only a few small speakers is too low. Even if people know that a certain direction is approaching an obstacle, they still need to pass Other means confirmed many times. In the Bose system, it can not only provide accurate direction and distance positioning information, but also cooperate with other existing sensors to determine the type of obstacles to provide different intuitive sound effects. For example, when a motorcycle is driving from the side to the rear, the sound in the car will show the distance and orientation of the motorcycle with the sound of a motorcycle engine.
This technology doesn’t seem to make much sense in terms of practicality at present. But the real role of this system is to transition to autonomous driving, allowing drivers to have “trust” in autonomous driving.
At this stage, autonomous driving is still between L2 and L3, which means that people must be vigilant and take over the vehicle at any time, but most people either do not believe in autonomous driving, or they believe in autonomous driving too much. I do n’t believe that it ’s because they ca n’t understand the vehicle ’s ability. Users do n’t know if the vehicle knows the surrounding environment, and they do n’t get effective and intuitive feedback. “What, but the driver needs to be distracted to observe, which may lead to things such as car accidents.
And users who are overly confident often get distracted to do other things as soon as they start the assistance system, and fail to realize the need to take over the vehicle in the first place, resulting in serious accidents. At this time, the intuitive sound information can be transmitted to the driver in the fastest way, making him aware of what is going to happen and responding quickly. Because in sight and hearing, hearing is the best”Dual use” method, the transmission of sound information does not affect the “intake” of other information, which means that when you drive, the sound reminder is the most natural way and does not disturb the driver.
In 2016, MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology conducted a three-year in-depth study, taking 21 Tesla, Volvo, Cadillac, Land Rover Range Rover Aurora models as the research object, investigating and counting the use of automatic The situation of driving assistance to understand the user’s trust in autonomous driving and the attention during automatic driving assistance. This research is still ongoing, with 99 participants, a total of 11,846 driving days, a cumulative mileage of more than 400,000 miles, and a total of 5.5 billion video frames collected.
In the research report, MIT believes that vehicles need to provide sensing and decision-making functions while adding supervision and reminder functions to provide redundant protection when abnormal conditions occur. At present, it is a common practice in the industry to monitor the driver’s attention through sensors such as in-car cameras, and to alert the owner of abnormal conditions by tightening seat belts, shaking the steering wheel, flashing the display, and issuing an alarm sound.
Through reminders in different ways, let users know clearly what the vehicle can and cannot do, which can gradually allow the driver to build trust in the vehicle and make people slowly adapt and get used to the automatic driving assistance system. Especially when fully autonomous driving comes, this “trust” becomes more important. People need to know clearly what the autonomous driving system perceives and what decisions will be made. In the way of information transmission, the sound signal is compared with other methods. Obviously moreAdding naturalness and directness does not affect passengers doing other things at the same time.
Of course, there are many “small uses” of directional audio information. For example, when searching for a place, the sound will come from the direction of the designated place to remind the user of the exact location of the destination; or When a conference call is held in the car, multiple people can speak at the same time to distinguish what one person is saying by the directionality of the sound, and the sound will not be confused because multiple people speak at the same time, so it is not clear.
By looking at the concept products that Bose has continuously launched in the past two years, this private company focusing on acoustics research obviously does not intend to stick to headphones and audio products in the future, but to take advantage of its existing car audio technology advantages Provide sound solutions for many pain points of automobile development. After all, a company based on “Audio For Life” only provides surging sound quality, which is obviously not enough to keep up with the fast-growing automotive industry, and how to play its own advantages will become the key to Bose’s future development.