OREANDA-NEWS. Tata Elxsi, a global design company and a part of the USD 100 billion Tata group, was declared winner of the first Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) User Experience Contest in the Best User Experience category. The AGL contest was centred on the theme – Designing the future of automotive infotainment user experience. Tata Elxsi’s concept human machine interface (HMI) called ‘Today’s tomorrow’ won the award for its intuitive and hassle free navigation.

The user interface, which is a beautiful, simplistic yet functional design, was achieved through the appropriate combination of typography, colour and other design elements to minimise driver distraction from in-vehicle information access and electronic controls. It featured backgrounds that changed colour hues depending on the time of the day and also provided an integrated user manual. As part of the prize, the architect and the designer of ‘Today’s tomorrow’ will now have an opportunity to collaborate on a proof-of-concept with Jaguar Land Rover and AGL.

The winners of the contest were announced on May 27, 2013 at the Automotive Linux Summit Spring in Tokyo, Japan. Other winners include Ford Motor Company in the Best New Feature category and Reaktor for Best Visual Appearance. Tata Elxsi is among the top five global R&D service providers for automotive electronics and design services. It brings together automotive electronics development experience, cross-technology expertise in multimedia, graphics, and connectivity, a world-class user experience and HMI design team, and system development capability for IVI and telematics. It is also an active member of the GENIVI, AUTOSAR and ARTOP consortiums.

Tata Elxsi works with leading OEM’s and tier 1 suppliers across the world for IVI, ADAS, Powertrain and body electronics. Matt Jones from AGL, said, “Tata Elxsi's submission conveys through its clean and consistent design that it can present the driver with the most important information and controls without being distracting. I would like to congratulate Tata Elxsi on this win.”

Satish Patil, chief designer - user experience, Tata Elxsi, said, “'Today’s tomorrow’ is about creating a vision for future automotive HMI. Cars of tomorrow would be far more digital with exponentially growing functionalities to make them safer, comfortable and connected. However in the process, the automotive HMI’s will get increasingly complex. ‘Today’s tomorrow’ is based on the premise that interfaces should be kept simple to let users handle complex functionalities easily and effectively.”