Comprehensively upgrade the cockpit interactive experience, and the upgraded CGI Studio leads a new trend in automotive HMI design

Today, the car is no longer a simple means of transportation, but an intelligent mobile terminal. By integrating various advanced sensors, controllers and actuators, cars can realize environment perception, analysis and decision-making, and realize functions such as autonomous driving, intelligent navigation, inter-vehicle communication, and Internet connection. These functions not only improve the convenience and safety of driving, but also make cars a new travel experience and lifestyle. The interactive interface (HMI) is an important part of modern smart cars. It is not only related to the driver's driving experience and safety, but also to the comfort and convenience of passengers. As a bridge for in-vehicle information exchange, HMI carries the important task of interacting between humans and vehicles. A friendly HMI can help users operate the car simply, intuitively and quickly, while also helping the car to maximize its performance.

As an important part of smart car GUI design, HMI design is of great significance to improving the quality, brand image and intelligent development of smart cars. “As an HMI design tool provider, our mission is to focus on providing complete HMI solutions for smart cars. Our vision is to develop an automotive HMI tool platform that is easier to use, higher performance, and more open, while providing leading products for the automotive market. "At the 2023 Shenzhen International Autonomous Driving Technology Summit Forum, Sun Houkai, Marketing Director of Kaga Fuyi Electronics (Shanghai) Co., Ltd., introduced the company's leading-performance HMI design tool-CGI Studio to the audience. As a tool adopted by 8 of the top 10 OEM manufacturers in the world, CGI Studio is widely favored for its scalable and hardware-independent HMI design advantages and its ability to create excellent and customizable embedded GUI solutions for smart cars. .

Sun Houkai, Marketing Director of Kaga Fuyi Electronics (Shanghai) Co., Ltd.

Here are some key features of this scalable and hardware-independent HMI design tool

Creating the perfect human-computer interface is not a step, but a process. CGI Studio is considered one of the best tools for creating and designing personalized graphical user interfaces because of the following features: First, CGI Studio is an open source editing platform, including the UI editor and other tools within the platform, and the source code is also open to Design companies and users; secondly, CGI Studio is very scalable and supports currently common automotive operating systems, such as Linux, Android, QNX, etc., and even some niche platforms; CGI Studio focuses on advanced usability functions, such as Ready-to-use HMI controls, automated workflows, and integrated state machines make it easy to create HMIs even for users without programming skills; CGI Studio enables fast import, and the award-winning AI Importer allows users to create HMIs without programming. Import resources directly, and the imported resources can be intelligently identified and edited directly. In addition to achieving seamless connection with multiple operating systems, CGI Studio also has a leading rendering engine, providing excellent rendering for car manufacturers or Tier 1 companies. , customizable, embedded GUI, including a high-performance OpenGL rendering engine. This feature can help car manufacturers advance product release time.

"CGI Studio is independent of various platforms and is also a cross-platform software. So far, CGI Studio has integrated different hardware ICs, including internationally renowned IC manufacturers TI, NXP, Infineon, ST, Renesas, etc. Now we are also working hard to do some new integrations with top domestic IC manufacturers." Sun Houkai revealed, "It is worth mentioning that for the development of customized GUI, we can do it according to the different needs of customers, such as different car manufacturers , different Tier 1 company dashboards, IVI systems, etc., this kind of customized GUI development function makes the customer's system or application even better."

CGI Studio editing interface

These unique capabilities of CGI Studio are very popular in the market and have gained a very good reputation and rich use cases in current market applications. Sun Houkai gave a set of data carefully: "So far, we have established cooperation with 8 of the top ten Internet car manufacturers in the world, and the applications developed through CGI studio have achieved mass production; and more than 6 Global Tier 1 companies have reached cooperation and jointly developed the IVI system. Through 23 years of hard work, we have maintained a leading edge in HMI creation and services. In the entire European market, Candera has always been the top partner of Tier 1 manufacturers in the European market. ." It is reported that so far, GUI has been successfully mass-produced on 50 million vehicles, which is the highest record in the application scale of HMI tools.

After years of iteration, the latest version of CGI Studio is CGI Studio 3.12. Compared with the previous generation, CGI Studio 3.12's enhanced smart importer now supports importing Figma files and can identify controls more accurately; with the new Fusion Editor, users can intuitively write their application logic; support for vector graphics ensures Better HMI graphics and lower memory footprint; an improved state machine editor provides a wealth of options to visually expand the scope of use, and the player allows rotating and seamless scaling of the GUI during production; upgraded The help system now offers dynamic documentation, including search and history, and support for multiple languages.

One-stop design tool chain to create the ultimate interactive experience

A complete set of HMI design software solutions is indispensable without the support of the tool chain. The picture below is a display of the CGI Studio tool chain. After users import 2D and 3D resources made with Photoshop or other design tools into Scene Composer (resource editor) through Importer, they directly edit to complete the required settings, and then add state machine (state machine editor) and Language tables (language tables). Manager), you can get a complete GUI solution.

Take the development of a car's dual-instrument solution as an example. You only need to import pictures and languages ​​to get a CGI Player (a simple interface). The whole process does not require manual programming. After completing the dual-open instrument interface, users can preview and simulate at any time on Windows or operating platforms. When the development progress reaches 100%, the entire resource logic management can be directly downloaded to the user's development board.

CGI Studio Toolchain

In addition, there is a performance analyzer (ANALYZER) in the CGI Studio tool chain. When encountering problems such as task scheduling, resource management, memory storage, etc. on the hardware platform, ANALYZER will perform real-time and visual analysis to find the bottleneck. where and resolve to achieve the best optimization and maximum performance.

Full coverage! Meet the diverse needs of low, medium and high-end platforms

In the automotive field, SOC integrates multiple functional modules, including processors, graphics processors, memory controllers, multimedia processors, etc. A common problem with mid- to low-end SOC platforms is that they have strong 2D functions but limited or almost no 3D rendering capabilities. To address this problem, CGI Studio has an interface to support a dedicated 2D API, not only bitmap transmission, but also rotation and layer changes.

CGI Studio also has a caching mechanism, making it more convenient to call various system memories. In terms of accelerated startup, CGI Studio has also made a lot of optimizations, including content partitioning, compression algorithms, asynchronous loading, etc. In some cases, the engine startup time is only within 100ms. Multi-frequency rendering is to perform different rendering instructions in a certain layer or a separate thread. For example, the rendering frequency of an instrument is 30 or 60 frames per second, but the HUD or IVI rendering is only 5, 10 or 15 frames per second. CGI Studio's multi-layer rendering function can reduce transmission and memory usage, so the performance of the entire GUI will be better.

In HMI design tools, different drawing areas and unnecessary areas are dirty areas. The management of dirty areas requires the automatic camera failure mechanism function. CGI Studio will directly delete unused images to save memory. There are two ways to manage resource packages in CGI Studio, one is to upload directly in VRAM, and the other is to map directly from Flash. For the memory pool, CGI Studio has also developed a special memory manager.

“After application in tens of millions of cars, we found that most of the problems encountered during the mass production of GUI are fragmentation and garbage collection, which will cause the program to become slower and slower or even freeze or freeze. CGI Studio's dirty area management and memory pool functions make the GUI run reliably without the above problems." Sun Houkai said, "Fonts are also a major feature of CGI Studio. In Europe, different countries use different languages, and there are more than 20 commonly used languages. More than one type. Different font languages ​​require specialized font encoders. CGI Studio can provide various font and language management methods such as Freetype and Monotype, making HMI design tools translate faster and perform better. In short, for mid- to low-end SOC platforms In terms of performance, CGI Studio can achieve the best performance in the entire European market, competitors and the entire Asia-Pacific market."

Mid-to-high-end SOC platforms refer to system-level chips with high performance and advanced functions, which are used to drive and manage various electronic systems of vehicles. One of the most common functions is 3D rendering. CGI Studio can support different versions of 3D Open GL ES 1.1 to 3.0, including various occlusion culling, engines, shaders, etc. There is also extensive support for industry standards such as