Consumer Electronics Show
News from Las Vegas, including Audi and Merc concepts
AUDI scored a hit at last year’s Shanghai show with its customer environmentfocused AI:ME. Now Auto Express has been among the first to ride in the city car concept, at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, to see how it works.
The AI:ME (it’s pronounced ‘Amy’) is, in effect, a sandbox that allows the German brand’s engineers to play around with how we can interact with a vehicle when we no longer have to drive it all of the time.
As such, it is immediately obvious when we arrive at our test venue that dynamic assessment isn’t part of this ride. In fact, we’re going to tour an empty rooftop car park in Las Vegas at walking pace.
The doors glide open, revealing an entry space that does without a B-pillar to allow maximum ease of access. The AI:ME is designed to be a shared space that bridges the gap between a car interior and your living room. The materials used are pilfered from home furnishings; there’s velvet on the door linings, a piece of walnut above the steering wheel, and slabs of Corian, a hard surface commonly found on kitchen counter tops.
The front seats are quite sofa-like – wider and squidgier than you’d usually find in a car. There’s a huge amount of space in front of them, too, where Audi’s designers have cut away the dash to almost nothing.
The reason the AI:ME is at CES is to show off a few new cabin tweaks – the results, if you will, of technological developments and fresh thinking from the engineers. Most significantly, the curved 55-inch OLED display across the front of the cabin now features built-in eye tracking to allow users to interact with the car’s systems without using a touchpad or voice commands. Audi’s demo flashes up a choice of meals on the display, to simulate the AI:ME approaching a restaurant that it knows its user likes.
The low winter sun in Vegas makes the display a little hard to see, but the infra-red tracking isn’t fooled and it’s possible to flick between options just by adjusting your line of gaze. It’s easy to perceive how this tech could combine with voice commands to allow you to choose, then say, “That’s the one”.
Audi is also working on how to spirit users away from their journey – and it showcases this via VR headsets. The AI:ME completes another lap of its Vegas car park while we watch a ‘journey’ over some spectacular scenery from Guilin province in China.
The system adjusts the progress through the spectacular mountain landscape to reflect the car’s movement – so when it turns right to avoid a car park bollard, the footage reacts. Audi’s boffins say there’s potential for the car to even play back different versions of the surroundings that the car is passing through – showing digitally created historical images of the area, for example.
“The AI:ME shows how we will interact with a vehicle when we no longer have to drive it“