VANET’s Infotainment Services Portal Design

Abstract

Recently, infotainment system has been used in the majority of new cars. It is considered as one of the car’s specifications. Nowadays, the consumers become bored from using the traditional infotainment systems because these systems are customized for the driver and disregard the passengers who want to be able to access the Internet and keep in touch with their friends any time they want besides getting entertained through watching movies and listening to the music. This study illustrates the portal design and the features of a new infotainment system that serves three kinds of users: drivers, passengers, and children. Moreover, this system adds a new feature which allows the users to share the information, such as locations and multimedia contents, and chatting between cars using VANET services. In addition, combines many features of some famous cars’ infotainment system to be in a single system and provide the passengers with some important services such as touristic services and health and safety services. While designing in car infotainment system, there are some constraints that aim to increase drivers and passengers safety in the same time decrease drivers distraction besides offering some entertainment and provide the needed information. Therefore, this paper studies some important guidelines that should be followed in designing the user interface of any infotainment system. Furthermore, we demonstrate the three phases of the design process: discovery phase, design phase and implementation. Using the collected data we designed a first mockup prototype that we submitted for some users’ evaluation. Some problems were spotted and corrected. This resulted in the development of a first functional prototype that was implemented in iOS. This design was tested as well. We finally propose an improved version of the interface and we test it in simulation using a tablet (iPad). The different prototypes will be exposed in this document along qualitative (satisfaction) and quantitative (time) results of their usability. These results are encouraging and showed the validity of our approach.