Multimedia information presentation in smart cars and highways

An essential component of Advanced Traveler Information Systems, in-vehicle route displays give drivers route options, alert them to incidents, and show their present location. In this report, researchers explore multimedia interfaces to present route information to travelers using map, text, and auditory-based representations, focusing on developing portable multimedia interfaces.

The report concludes that the graphical user interface (GUI) for display of route information is satisfactory for small road maps. The GUI also proved useful for visually checking map quality. The Tcl/Tk toolkit, in which the GUI was developed, is a reasonable tool to design an interface because it is portable to many platforms. Speech generation tools are not yet robust enough for use with large maps. Future work could include extending the GUI to provide a hierarchical display for large roadmaps, extending the amount of information conveyed to the user, and improving speech generation techniques.