Cocos officially enters the automotive field and launches its first smart cockpit solution

A new round of technological revolution is leading the transformation of the automotive industry from multiple directions. One important trend is that it is narrowing the distance between cars and games.

In order to create a richer cockpit experience, more and more car companies are beginning to install games as an important feature on new cars. Many automakers are even trying to introduce innovative solutions such as game engines in the development process of new cars and related functions to redefine automotive research and development.

Smart cockpits have become an important part of creating differentiation and attracting users. Recently, Cocos, the world's leading digital interactive content development platform, officially announced the launch of a smart cockpit solution for automotive applications. According to Gasgoo, the solution is based on the powerful graphics rendering capabilities of Cocos' Cocos Creator development engine, which can run on a variety of chip platforms and is compatible with mainstream car systems such as Linux, QNX, and Android. It provides technical support to the automotive industry in terms of in-vehicle HMI design, ADAS function visualization, in-vehicle virtual images, and in-vehicle game development, helping the automotive industry upgrade to intelligence.

Empowering the transformation of the automotive industry, Cocos launches the first intelligent cockpit solution

What kind of chemical effect will occur when a game engine is combined with a car? Many people's first reaction may be in-car games.

Indeed, as comfort and entertainment continue to become new consumption trends in the automotive field, in order to create a more pleasant riding experience for end users, in the past two years, car companies represented by Tesla, Xiaopeng, Ideal, BMW, Audi, Ford, etc. have been vigorously promoting games in cars to further expand the application scenarios of smart electric vehicles .

Tesla's in-car game interface. Image source: Tesla

To create an immersive gaming experience, OEMs have even deeply integrated game control with vehicle systems. Nowadays, it is no longer a new thing for users to play games in the car, even use the steering wheel and brake pedal to control the game, and connect the game scene with the control of the car seats, air conditioning, ambient lights, etc.

But the disruption that game engines bring to the automotive industry goes far beyond in-car games.

As intelligent transformation continues to deepen, the boundaries of the automotive industry are constantly being broken, making it possible to integrate and develop with more and more industries. In order to quickly develop products that meet market demand, the automotive industry has also begun to draw inspiration from related fields such as games to inspire the development of smart cars.

For example, Baidu and Tencent have tried to use game engines to create virtual environments for self-driving car testing as early as two years ago to shorten development time and save R&D costs. In order to optimize the customer purchasing experience, Porsche has even developed a virtual reality car configurator, allowing customers to use VR glasses to view the three-dimensional simulation of their configured vehicles in the future. Volvo has also introduced interactive virtual experience into the vehicle development process and marketing links with the help of real-time 3D technology.

Cocos’ smart cockpit solution was launched in this context.

As one of the world's three major cross-platform game engines alongside Unreal and Unity, Cocos was officially established in 2010 and has been deeply involved in the game engine field for more than a decade. It has a market share of 40% in the domestic mobile game market and 20% in the global market. It has also made relevant arrangements in cutting-edge fields such as education, metaverse, and XR. The release of the smart cockpit solution this time marks the further improvement of Cocos' business territory.

Hyper-realistic car rendered in real time by Cocos Creator. Image source: Cocos

Specifically, in terms of in-vehicle human-computer interaction interface design, Cocos' solution can use the PBR material system to present 3D car models with high fidelity on the interactive screen, making the HMI an effective information interaction carrier between people and cars, and comprehensively improving the interactive experience.

Panorama of Cocos smart cockpit solution. Image source: Cocos

Based on powerful development tools, Cocos can also enable car companies and related technology providers to model and render the perception data, positioning map data and vehicle signal data obtained by the vehicle during driving, realize the visualization of ADAS, and let users enjoy a cooler and more immersive 3D panoramic view effect, realizing "what you see is what you get", helping to improve driving safety.

In terms of in-vehicle virtual images, in order to build a character image that is as realistic as possible and make the user experience more immersive, Cocos has built the key technologies required for virtual images, such as modeling, lip-syncing, motion capture, rendering, and AI access. Developers can create exclusive interactive virtual images in different styles such as cartoons, two-dimensional, and hyper-realism based on high-fidelity 3D rendering technology.

In-car games mainly rely on Cocos' strong accumulation in the game industry to help car companies build in-car game centers, so that users can click and play in fragmented time. Cocos can also enable car companies to link cockpit hardware capabilities, turning the cockpit into a "mobile game room" in seconds, and realizing an immersive in-car gaming experience.

According to Cocos CTO Lin Shun, a number of mainstream car companies are currently conducting relevant functional research and development based on Cocos' smart cockpit solutions, and the corresponding cooperation projects are expected to be implemented starting this year.

Lightweight + open source ecology, building a strong competitive moat

In the field of game engines, Cocos is not the first player to enter the automotive scene. As the application potential of game engines in the automotive field continues to be discovered, in the past two years, many engine companies have begun to "expand their boundaries" towards the automotive industry, including well-known companies such as Unreal and Unity.

Despite this, as a domestic engine, Cocos did not show much worry. Lin Shun pointed out that this is mainly because Cocos is more lightweight in overall engine design. In particular, based on the self-developed Cocos Runtime lightweight digital content runtime framework, Cocos can enable the development of various digital interactive content scenarios that require "click-to-play", which greatly reduces the system load, which is very important for in-vehicle scenarios.

"The operating mode of in-car applications is different from that of mobile phones. Multiple tasks are often run in parallel in real time in the foreground, which is particularly sensitive to the consumption of computing resources and memory. In addition, the automotive industry has higher requirements for vehicle safety than other fields, which makes in-vehicle applications have higher requirements for running smoothness and real-time performance." Lin Shun said.

Cocos focuses on mobile platforms and has long provided lightweight, high-performance professional development tools for IoT, XR devices or browsers. It already has a large number of application cases. In addition, its investment in 3D content on platforms such as mini-games and the Web has provided important guarantees for Cocos to quickly keep up with the cutting-edge product development needs of the automotive industry.

Image source: Cocos

Cocos' powerful developer ecosystem is also a strong support for its layout of the automotive business. So far, the Cocos engine has served 1.5 million registered developers and 300,000 monthly active developers, covering 203 countries and regions, and reaching more than 1.6 billion end users. While Cocos empowers these developers with technology, it can also further improve the application ecosystem through the continuous innovation of developers and achieve better development of digital content in the automotive field.

A typical example is online education. According to Lin Shun, before Cocos entered the education industry, there were already developers who had set foot in it. In addition, Cocos has not set up a Metaverse project, but some developers have used the underlying technical support of Cocos to carry out project research and development.

In addition, as a cross-platform engine, Cocos can provide more complete services to partners and cooperate with customers to carry out more in-depth research and development compared to its competitors. In terms of the underlying system, Cocos can perfectly adapt to mainstream car systems such as Android, Linux, and QNX, and has also reached in-depth cooperation with HarmonyOS, becoming the world's first game engine to support HarmonyOS.

Because of this, Lin Shun said that many companies in the automotive field have shown great interest in Cocos' solutions, especially in the three areas of 3D HMI, ADAS visualization, and virtual images. The automotive field has very strong demand. Although many companies have strong willingness to develop in-car games, it is still in the early stages.

However, Lin Shun pointed out that considering the importance of games in increasing interaction between people, the future prospects of in-car games are still worth looking forward to. Even for the unique scenario of in-car, there may be some completely different ways of playing, such as deeper customization combined with the car scene, or the birth of a game center that is more suitable for the form of car. In this regard, Cocos is also conducting relevant explorations.

Image source: Cocos

Continue to expand the automotive industry, and the next step will be to launch an editor